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.
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …’ I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.
In the past, analytical psychologists may be said to have overvalued, even idealized, the mind and what might be called ‘thinking’, and neglected both the body and, in particular, the contribution of body language to the understanding of patients who come to us for analysis. It was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as early as 1796 who, in a letter to Charles Lloyd wrote:
I know a great many physicians, they are shallow Animals: having always employed their minds about Body and Gut, they imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but Gut and Body. (Coleridge 1796)
The old Cartesian split between mind and body has had a detrimental effect on the whole field of mental health, including our own discipline of depth psychology. Conventional scientific medicine may be said to have fostered a split between the objective body and the body of