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Sebastian Leikert is a practising psychoanalyst in Saarbrücken, Germany. In this article, he brings forth the question of how to build a bridge between the body
experience and the symbolic experience in the clinical work with patients with severely perturbed psyche-soma integration. Making a comparison with the initial period of psychoanalysis, the author affirms that what we usually find today in our consulting rooms are patients presenting this kind of dissociation, thus proposing the need to include a new analytic technique, which can allow clinical work from that body level.
Leikert distinguishes two sections of the unconscious. Besides the symbolic unconscious that produces dreams and neurotic symptoms, he postulates a second structure, which he calls the bodily unconscious. The author states that in this bodily unconscious we can identify an area where traumatic inscriptions in the body-self have lost contact with symbolization. He calls this area ‘encapsulated body engrams’ and describes them as disorganized areas of the body, which carry pain or are numb or painfully tense, resulting from early trauma. He discusses some similarities between this concept and that of Tustin's ‘autistic object’. Tustin (1984, p. 281) has created the notion of autistic object in reference to ‘self-induced bodily sensations’ that allow the subject to maintain a sense of inner stability, without having any symbolic meaning attached to it. The author finds that this type of isolation from the symbolic network is a common element between both sections of the unconscious. Nevertheless, the encapsulated body engram does have a meaning, though it is not expressed through images or words but is contained in bodily tensions, which are memory traces of somatic responses to catastrophic psychic states. Since these engrams are often very repetitive and resistant to transformation through symbolic means, Leikert proposes the need to transform the psychoanalytic technique in aid of this ty