Integration of psyche and soma starts from the earliest contact of the baby with his parents. With the help of maternal empathy and reverie betaelements will be transformed into alphaelements. Mainly, the non transformed parts of the affect will be dealt with by evacuation or can even remain within the body and subsequently contribute to psychosomatic symptoms.

This paper describes how the body serves as an intermediate store between the psychic (inner) and outer reality and how psychosomatic symptoms can spread to the body of the analyst, who can make use of them to understand the patient on a deeper level.

The authors discuss the clinical material with the help of theoretical concepts of Wilhelm Reich, Winnicott, Bion, and M. Feldman. In addition, they link further details with theoretical concepts from Joyce McDougall, Piera Aulagnier and Ricardo Rodulfo.

In detail, the authors describe a specific communication between the body of the patient and the body of the psychoanalyst based on the concept of projective identification, as described by Heinz Weiß.

A clinical vignette illustrates the way how the analyst reacts to the patient with an intense body-countertransference, taking on the patient's symptoms for a short time. By internalizing the patient's symptoms in his own body, the analyst created a bodily communication - something ‘in between’ concerning the inner and the outer reality of both participants of the analytic dyad.

Because the analyst was able to recognise his psychosomatic experience as the fear of dying, the process of transforming the symptoms began, together with an emerging understanding of the patient's anxieties. The function of the psychosomatic symptoms was to contain the patient's fear of death. Having discovered this link, these frightening feelings could be worked through on a psychic level.