The Body in Question

As a practical matter, psychoanalysis is concerned with bodies that speak.

This statement of the obvious touches a nodal point for much significant debate in the theory and practice of our field. It takes some reflection on the two elements of this relation, the Body and Speech, to see why this is so.

How the body enters a psychoanalyst's consulting room is not primarily an architectural problem. Although the organic being arrives wrapped in countless garments and a therapy of the psyche does not suggest that they ought to be removed, much of our discourse presumes that we see beneath them.

This was certainly the case for Freud. The drive in his formulation is a “demand made upon the mind for work in consequence of its connection with the body” (Freud, , p. 122). Thus any derivative or representative of the drive encountered in the discourse of analysis was connected in turn to this connection. This is the biological, but perhaps better put, bodily link in classical Freudian drive theory, and it has often been cited as the reason for the rejection of that theory by subsequent schools of psychoanalysis arguing for a more social and/or interpersonal approach to motivation.

However, that there are two degrees of separation between the representatives of the drive that appear in analysis and the body as such, and that it is here, in the double linking of symbol to drive and drive to body, that the social world takes hold of corporeal being suggests that drive theory is far less reductive than it may first appear to be.

The fact remains that the role of the body in its relationship to the social and interpersonal world of the subject was recognized as a difficult question from the start and the source of much debate since the earliest days of the field. The paradoxical character of the embodied subject poses an inherent challenge to the psychoanalytic endeavor. This is why, for all contemporary schools, even those that take the most socially based and/or interpersonal of appr