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The role of the body in psychoanalysis is still a new scientific domain and it has only recently started to appear in the psychoanalytic literature. So we are indebted to Sebastian Leikert, Saarbrücken, for having gathered together a series of publications by various authors on this subject as an anthology in the present book.
In his well-argued introduction, Leikert outlines the scope of the book’s individual contributions or chapters. He makes the fundamental statement that
The body is always—and has always been—part of a human relational context that hinders or promotes its maturation. In every fiber of its being, the body is (also) determined by relational constellations. Thus, inasmuch as it incarnates the subject’s life history, it is a memory system. (8)
In addition to Freud, he refers in this connection primarily to Laplanche “because he places the body as the primary site of inscription at the centre of his General Theory of Seduction (Laplanche 2017)” (2). Leikert explains how in her physical care of the young child the mother inscribes her own sexual unconscious into the child’s body. “The unconscious messages deposited there then become the core of the infant’s unconscious and must be interpreted by the child … the enigmatic message of others” (8). He suggests although that the site of this inscription is a question that Laplanche left open.
With this observation, Leikert opens up the field in which the authors whose papers are collected in this volume are working. This raises the following questions: How does the body react to biographical constellations and how are events inscribed in it? What concepts have been developed concerning specific forms of representation in the body? How can the analyst apprehend this level of representation in his treatment technique? Leikert expressly emphasises here that it is not a matter of touching the analysand’s body in any literal sense. The touching occurs in the figurative sense through the analyst’s language, above