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Moderator: Gabriel Sapisochin (Spain). Panellists: Antonio Pérez-Sánchez (Spain). Eva Papiasvilli (USA). Roosevelt Cassiora (Brazil)
Most analysts would agree that their role in the analytic process is one of interpretation. The analyst offers himself as a container for all verbal and non-verbal utterances of a patient in the session. With this basic analytic attitude he tries to reach the patient’s unconscious internal world via his interpretations. However, when early traumatic emotional experiences could not be translated into symbolic verbal thought but remained in the soma, not accessing the psychic register, the analyst’s task becomes difficult. How can the somatic memory be activated?
This is the point of departure for Antonio Pérez-Sánchez’s case presentation (‘Interpretation and Primitive Body as External Reality of the Mind’). He writes at the onset:
And that this somatic memory can be activated, non-verbally of course, in the analytic situation. But we should pay more attention to the body as the handler of emotional life. And this occurs when early traumatic events have left such an imprint that introjection of the experience was impossible, because it was unbearable. In consequence, the body ceases to be a complement to the mind, and is instead dissociated, becoming a reality that is external to psychic life, as the only way to avoid the unbearable experience. Thus, it remains a primitive, unevolved body.
Very empathically, he describes the analysis of a patient whose main manifest symptomatology consisted in frequent attacks of binge eating. At the beginning these somatic manifestations had no psychic significance for the patient. Antonio Pérez-Sánchez convincingly demonstrates how he slowly reached the deeper somatic, non-symbolized levels of the patient’s psychopathology. He shows that interpretations encompass not only the verbal content of spoken sentences, but also the affective quality, the sound and the prosody of the analyst’s speech, including h