Somatic Correspondences During Psychoanalysis

In a previous article (Silverman, 1988) I concluded, “Correspondences, when the analyst has not verbalized his disturbed thoughts [in a given hour] and they appear in the patient's spoken associations during [that hour's] analytic treatment, are not due to a single cause.” I noted that in some instances the cause might be thought transference (a term often used interchangeably with telepathy). However, my studies presented no conclusive empirical proof of its existence. It seemed to me then that further exploration of correspondences during analytic sessions was necessary to throw more light on the matter.

Although I focused on cognitive correspondences in the above-mentioned paper, I had also become more aware of somatic correspondences occurring in analytic work. This led me again to “bite the sour apple” (Jones, 1957, p. 391). Accordingly, in this article I will present case material from five patients over a four-month period illustrating somatic correspondences during psychoanalytic hours. In addition, both cognitive and somatic correspondences in one other patient are followed for five months as they occur in five different sessions. I will then discuss what such data may signify or add to our understanding of correspondences in general during psychoanalysis. The correspondences were spontaneous and not elicited experimentally. The physical symptom or response was experienced first by the analyst and then by the patient. Of course, subtle and often overlooked sensory stimuli between analyst and analysand may occur, for example, visual contact from waiting room to couch; in a far lesser degree, touch (brushing by en passant); occasional olfactory or auditory cues, and so on. Also, once on the couch, the patient hardly can be said to be in a stimulus-free setting. The same is true of the analyst in the chair. If such stimuli occurred in the cases reported, their effect on the data collected was taken into consideration.

The occurrence of these correspondences was