The Body Image Study Group has been meeting under the auspices of the Arnold Pfeffer Center for Neuro-Psychoanalysis for a decade. Its eight members are comprised of five psychoanalysts and two psychologists, and one biologist who went through analytic training. The Study Group usually meets the first Sunday of each month, the day after the monthly Pfeffer Center lecture.

We have been looking at the role of the body in the mind from several points of view—psychoanalytic, sexual, linguistic, biological, and others—that are hard to categorize. We have looked at how the mind is modeled on the body (“The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego”), how the image of the body affects the mind, as in children whose bodies were damaged, and how the brain “makes” the mind. We have studied how Freud based his early ideas of the mind on nineteenth-century neurology, not on observations of analytic patients, and how