In this paper I argue that psychoanalytic theory and practice is quite removed from bodily experience. I use the work of Elias on the history of manners and Laqueur's work on the construction of the body to consider some of the reasons for this omission. Psychoanalysis is the “talking cure,” and those analysts like Reich and Ferenczi who were more interested in bodily experience and action were marginalized. I trace the secret vein of interest in the body within psychoanalysis and the parallel development in the last hundred years of study of the body in the work of Gindler, Selver, Feldenkreis, Alexander, and others. I then show how contemporary neurobiologists like Damasio, whose ideas resonate with the earlier theories of William james, point to the importance of increasing our patients' and our own awareness of somatic experience.