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There's no remedy, I suppose—this body just made from the beginning to be shocked, constantly surprised, perpetually stunned, poked and prodded, shaken awake, shaken again and again roughly, rudely then left, even more bewildered, even more amazed.
Speaking from the body may draw us into poetry, gesture, illness, or brimming silence. Viewed from the Cartesian split we suffer, our bodies are places both of excess and inadequacy, and so early psychoanalytic thinkers problematized the body. Although Freud declared that “the ego is first and foremost a body ego,” his view was set in a cultural context that saw the body as primitive. A thing to be subdued, placed at the mind's service, bodily experience was considered valuable and healthy only if mentalized, symbolized, translated into speech.
Speech itself, privileged as the “talking cure,” has tended to be abstracted from voice, its sensual, bodily dimension. The consequence, as several of the authors point out here, is that the psychodynamic therapeutic couple is distilled into two minds communicating within a physical situation that has become ritually restrictive and, ironically, seemingly bent on keeping our bodies out of it.
Nearly all the authors in this intriguing collection are affiliated with the New York analytic community and are engaged in the elaboration of relational theory and practice. They join in a project, strongly influenced by feminism and postmodernism, to revisit the question of the body, and to fashion new models of psyche-soma integration. For them, a two-person psychology includes two bodies, and the intersubjective world is, in Philip Bromberg's phrase, “a shared psychosomatic reality.”
Lewis Aron's opening essay, “The Clinical Body and the Reflexive Mind,” helpfully delineates the many streams of thought which carry the