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In a tongue-in-cheek remark one author suggests that the re-emergence of the interest in the body among psychoanalysts is a reflection of the ‘psycho-market’. ‘Seeing the psycho-market as part of a free market economy, could it be that we as psychoanalysts feel our livelihoods threatened by the indiscriminate supply of body-oriented therapies and self-awareness techniques being offered, partly even without proper qualifications (my emphasis) on this market today’. The implication that analysts are properly qualified to deal with the body is left unsaid, and no doubt could be challenged. In part, this collection of essays is a major attempt to put substance to that claim and one is left with the lingering feeling that new ground has been broken and that the ‘abundance of inflexible taboos and prejudices amongst analysts’ is beginning to crumble. Certainly this book suggests that in Germany, at least, serious conceptual, theoretical, clinical and research enquiries are being conducted.
The first section contains three rather brief reviews of the psychoanalytic literature on the body and psychoanalysis, body schema and the skin and body. The historical survey describes Freud's early work on hysteria and his own reluctance to accept fully the biological base to psychoanalytic terminology. It links the work of Ferenczi, Fénichel, Reich, Lowen and the emergence of psychosomatic medicine. The theoretical formulation described by McDougall appears to find favour with several authors and underlies the basis to the body-therapies described in subsequent sections. McDougall describes the consequence of the tendency to develop split-off affects as the infant's way of countering early unempathic treatment. The ‘not feeling anything’ offers the only chance of escaping infinite torment which in itself leads to the state of'inner emptiness' and the damaged early nucleus of self.
The sections on body schema and body self build on the insights gained from psychoanalytic work and cover