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Patients who have the belief that they are dead will usually be found to have an almost complete anaesthesia of the body. (Craig, 1905, as quoted in Sletvold, 2014, p. 69).
Jon Sletvold's book is a masterful, uncanny, and obsessional work, with a paradoxical effect, mainly because a book about the body has so little vitality in it. It is interesting that it is written with almost no metaphor, imagery, or sensuousness. The book deserves attention for its content, but I would also like to remark on the strangeness of its form, which does work in some ways against the book, and in some ways in parallel to it. It is remarkable that Sletvold's writing style generates a text that mimics the motor function he will privilege as the main source of unconscious communication. At the same time, the author's deadening prose exerts a counterforce against the excitement of some of the ideas presented in the book.
Sletvold observes that we have traditionally stressed the importance of the symbolic and verbal dimension in our analytic work, using unconscious meaning in dreams, slips of the tongue, and associations to understand the transference and countertransference experience. Here, Sletvold recognizes the importance of the body's motor activity and implicit language of movements (tonality and rhythm of speech, gaze and posture, facial expressions), placing the study of “muscular behavior” on par in analytic work with dreams and transference. Rather than relying on words or reverie, Sletvold's aim is to expand the scope of analytic attention to “return to a bodily source of unconscious meaning.”
It is ironic that although Sletvold makes an appeal to analysts to recognize the body, he drains his book of flesh and blood by using language that is strangely disembodied. Sletvold rarely includes visual imagery, verbal play, or vignettes in his writing. The poetic touches are to be found in the impressive array of citations, mainly in the whimsical thought experiments of philosophers, but