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Dear Editors,
I should like to express my thanks to Dr Judith Mitrani for offering us both the theoretical framework and a detailed clinical presentation of bodily centered protections in adolescence (Mitrani, 2007). The author discusses thoroughly the resort to sensation-dominated defenses in cases with inadequate development of the capacity for mental and emotional functioning. These individuals are not given the opportunity to establish, on the intrapsychic level, the function of a psychic second skin or to harbor the representation of an object capable of mentally containing emotional experience. Taking refuge in their own bodies and bodily sensations to support their faltering mental functioning seems to be an inescapable route for them. Although the paper focuses primarily on adolescents and their newly developed bodily capability to transform into reality what would otherwise stay in the realm of phantasy, evidence is provided that this major defensive route is manifested across the age spectrum. Autistic children seem to resort to sensation-dominated defenses to sustain a poorly demarcated boundary between internal and external reality. Adults attacking their own bodies also employ bodily centered defenses to cope with otherwise not mentally elaborate psychic experiences.
In the rich clinical material three levels of resorting to the body could be discerned: (a) the direct sensory stimulation representing the major route of bodily centered defenses, (b) behavioral changes substituting for the, as yet, inadequately developed mental functioning, and (c) bodily based metaphors still relying on metaphorically generated sensory stimulation of the body surface.
The analysand resorts to the direct sensory stimulation of bingeing and purging to support the faltering Ego. Freud, himself, referred to the importance of the direct sensory stimulation by referring to perception as being to Ego what drives are to id (Freud, 1923, pp. 24-6). In this regard perception is consi