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.
When Freud (1923) described the ego as “deriving from bodily sensations” and as “a mental projection of the surface of the body” (p. 26) could he have been suggesting a new “royal road” to the unconscious? Could the pathways from the body to the psyche and back again be that road? Judging from Psychosomatics Today: A Psychoanalytic Perspective and from the literature this elegant volume is based on, I would say that such a question, demanding a yes or no answer, is not unlike a Zen koan. Devised by the Buddhist patriarchs to entrap the mind of the seeker in a seemingly unanswerable question, a koan, when pondered long and hard, may serve to suddenly eject the mind from its inherent dualism into a profound understanding of the nature of existence, where neither answer and both answers are true.
And indeed the question of whether one can find psychoanalytic meaning in the afflictions of the body can seem imponderable precisely because the patients presenting with somatic ailments described in this literature tend to evince a deafening, psychical silence. Though the surface of their bodies is inflamed with weeping, angry eruptions, nothing seems to roil their mind. There is no pain, no pleasure, no fantasy, only a