You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Psychoanalytic theory is rapidly expanding beyond the one person drive model to incorporate new data sources such as infant observation and the transference/countertransference duet. With new paradigm shifts we can move beyond Cartesian mind-body duality to embrace a mind-body continuum
Harriet Kimble Wrye is Training and Supervising Psychoanalyst and Past President, The Los Angeles Institute and Society for Psychoanalytic Studies (LAISPS); Faculty, The Wright Institute, Los Angeles and UCLA, Extension. Member, The International Psychoanalytic Association. Coauthor, with (1994), The Narration of Desire: Erotic Transferences and Countertransferences. Hillsdale, NJ: Analytic Press.
and explore the paradoxes inherent in the transitional phenomena of the mindbody realm.
The papers in this issue draw our attention to embodiment in psychoanalysis, particularly the ways in which we bring our culture-bound, linguistically-balanced psychic apparatus to bear on our patients' embodiment and sexuality. While analytic attention generally focuses on the verbally accessible, differentiated and developed, oedipal genitally-oriented body, how can we and how often do we access the undeveloped early preoedipal body before words? In other words, which body and how and when is it known to the subjects of analysis? How is gender constructed and shaped? This special collection on embodiment urges us to attune to our own and our patients' body-oriented self-perceptions, to embedded intellectual prejudice carried by both analyst and patient alike, and to reading the body as a new unprejudiced text. In addition to intellectual self-scrutiny, the analyst is encouraged to introspectively attend to bodily states of mind. In the inchoate, ungendered, nonverbal sensorium of the body other ways to reinscribe consciousness with freer more integrated states of mind—body coherence may emerge.