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Many years ago Donald Winnicott (1949/1975) suggested that our habit of localizing the mind in the head may reflect a certain schizoid tendency. To be sure, there is a strong, objective material link between the concept of mind and the organ of the brain, and psychoanalysis does not dispute the neurological basis of mental phenomena. Anatomically, however, the central nervous system extends over the entire body, whose surface may be conceived as the largest single organ, a vital extension of the brain. We know that neurotransmitters are also produced in the abdomen. The concepts of the body ego (Freud, 1923) and the body schema (Schilder, 1950; Scott, 1948) suggest that the psyche in psychoanalytic thought has always referred to the whole body and to primordial bodily experience rather than to just the mind or the brain in the split off sense.
Freud (1915) described the drive (instinct) as “a concept on the frontier between the mental and the somatic … the psychical representative of the stimuli originating from within the organism and reaching the mind, as a measure of the demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (pp. 121-122). The “frontier” formulation has great intellectual appeal, but it may also have encouraged dissatisfaction with the drive model, since it implies both mind–body dualism and physicalistic reductionism at the same time: mind and body are apparently opposed, and yet the body acts on the mind through the drive. An alternative formulation, which was implicit in Freud since the Project (1895), would be that mind is an emergent property of body (Levin, 1989, 1992). From this perspective, the drive model appears as