You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
What changes when we view psychoanalytic theory through the lens of embodiment? Nothing—and everything! Seen from the perspective of embodied connectedness that we (Doris Brothers and Jon Sletvold) develop in our book A New Vision of Psychoanalytic Theory Practice and Supervision: TALKING BODIES such enduring psychoanalytic concepts as dissociation transference resistance and interpretation are radically transformed. We offer new ways to describe the therapeutic process to understand traumatic experiences and to enhance the supervisory process. The guiding theme of our book is that psychoanalytic dialogues are conducted by talking bodies—sometimes with words and sometimes without them.
In our introduction we provide brief autobiographies and describe how we came to write this book together. We begin our book by suggesting a shift away from a word-and-concept-based psychoanalysis to one that is fundamentally body-based. Drawing on the work of Merleau-Ponty and Lakoff and Johnson we provide a rationale for using the words I you we and world in place of traditional psychoanalytic language—whenever possible—in order to allow analysts to feel what is being conveyed in their bodies. We contend that while our attention tends to move among these aspects of mind many factors affect the fluidity and ease of the I-you-we-world flow.
We then offer a new approach for describing clinical situations based on this suggested language. This involves selecting a critical moment in the therapeutic exchange and first focusing on one’s own bodily reactions to a patient then “becoming”’ the patient through imitation and finally visualizing the interaction between oneself and the patient.
We conclude the chapter by discussing what happens in “the silence between the words.”
Central to our approach is the idea that psychoanalytic encounters take place between “foreign bodies.” Contending that we cannot fully know others or ourselves we suggest replacing the traditional translational mode—interp