Foreword

Minding the Body is not only about what Alessandra Lemma discovers about the relationship between the mind and the body, but how she discovers it. This intellectually stimulating book will appeal to the professional, the academic and the lay-person who is interested in the nature and function of the body and its various and often puzzling manifestations. Lemma’s research is broad and thorough. She has referenced papers from across the psychoanalytic spectrum, has studied biology, philosophy, film and fairy tales, and cited neuro-scientific research. Minding the Body deepens and broadens Lemma’s understanding of the territory she explored in her previous book Under the Skin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Body Modification (2010).

At the outset Lemma informs us that the evidence that supports her findings comes mainly from her three- to five-times-weekly psychoanalytic work with adolescents and adults. Mental health professionals will be helped enormously by Lemma’s honest, open and detailed clinical accounts of her sessions with patients who present with physical symptoms, and especially her understanding of the way these patients affect her. Lemma’s experience of the transference, countertransference, and particularly her own bodily countertransference is her primary resource for understanding her patient’s state of mind and determining how and when to intervene.

Lemma’s basic assumption is that embodiment shapes the mind. As she points out, following Freud, the most primitive form of self-representation is a body representation. The body anchors the ego in physical reality. The ego emerges in relation to the body. Lemma’s view is that the ‘body is a basic fact of life that supports all other psychic functions’ (Freud, 1927).

Bisexuality

An early link between psychoanalysis and biology was based on Freud’s view of a constitutionally inherent bisexuality, which was derived from the anatomy and embryology of his day. As he said at the end of his life:

Psychoanal