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The editors of Body as Psychoanalytic Object express their displeasure with my review of their book using the language of labelling and disqualification rather than that of respectful disagreement. They assert that I have not written what they characterize as a “legitimate” review, that the review is “odd,” that it is a “misreading,” and that I have made errors. The review was published a year ago, so I hope the interested reader will read it before forming an opinion about the criticism as what follows only addresses particular assertions in the letter, not the sweeping generalizations that characterize much of it.
The substance of the objections is not clear. The editors believe that I do not understand what the body as psychoanalytic object means, and that I do not understand the kind of body-to-body communication they describe. They write: “each vignette presents the body as a unique type of psychoanalytic object for our analytic attention.” They assert the presence of what they call “body-to-body communication in the analytic couple.” And they write about “the body’s capacity to communicate its state through dreaming,” suggesting that they view “the body” as an entity separate from the thoughtful self.
When they write “Robbins overlooks Eckhoff’s thesis that dreaming starts in the body,” they do not realize that I wrote about dreaming in 2015, elaborating and revising Freud’s model based on the primary process mind which is basically somatic and enactive.
In support of the idea that the body is an autonomous communicating entity, they cite this passage from Bion’s Learning from Experience: “it is with the detection and observation of these [psychoanalytic] objects that the psychoanalyst must concern himself in the conduct of an analysis (1962, p. 68).” This conveys the false impression that Bion’s reference to a psychoanalytic object refers to the body. In fact, Bion’s book – especially this section – consists of his mathematical-logical schema to account for how