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In their 2023 book, Talking Bodies, Doris Brothers and Jon Sletvold bring a fresh perspective on the role of embodiment as a fundamental, organizing aspect of experience. This book is grounded by a weaving together of literature on the subject, from psychology and psychoanalysis, infant development research, neurobiology, and anthropology. The authors propose a psychoanalytic framework for how individuals exchange energy and information with others through the body and live as embodied beings within their social context, particularly in a world where trauma is ever present and ongoing.
To lay the groundwork, Brothers and Sletvold suggest that traditional analytic language distances us from the full texture of human-to-human interacting and offer a more embodied set of concepts—namely “I, you, we and world”—to hold space for the body-to-body exchanges that occur between individuals and their social contexts. They propose using the word I to refer to the individual’s embodied experience of themselves, as opposed to language such as “the self.” Rather than referring to the other as “the object,” the authors propose the word you, which brings attention to how we experience others by consciously and unconsciously attuning to sensations in our own bodies. A sense of “we-ness” develops out of sensing the embodiment of both I and you. We-ness, importantly, is also based on past experiences, procedural memory, and one’s broader social context and can include family, community, and society. The concept of world includes the political, religious, scientific, and natural aspects of human experiencing. Brothers and Sletvold reference a wide range of literature to establish that the complex intermingling of I, you, we and world is maintained by body-to-body exchanges, such as facial expressions, tones of voice, postures, and types of movement.
While this may seem at first glance to be a slight adjustment, the value of this shift in language is significant when it is applied to self