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In contrast to comprehensive study of the individual's personal relationships, insufficient emphasis has been laid on his patterns of relationship to his own
body image, and the ego's manipulation (use) of perceptions. Body sensations may be used, within or outside the analytic situation, to express instinctual drives, or as defensive maneuvers of the ego. The body ego is the gateway to the affects; analytic scrutiny of body sensations affords rich clues to the meaning of defensive and expressive aspects of personal relationships. Glover long ago stressed a closely related point: patients who pay attention to their personal relationships to the exclusion of sensory symptoms and other problems of body image are most difficult to treat. The analytic task is to integrate all spheres of action and relationship, within and without the patient. How experiences of phantom limb are utilized to reactivate early traumata is illustrated with several cases. The sensory perceptions of phantom limbs (not necessarily of amputated limbs; impaired function may produce the identical syndrome) may represent unrecognized and repressed memories from a remote past. For example, in a girl with a leg crippled by poliomyelitis, the loss of the mother became equated with the loss of the function in that leg, pain and other sensations having corollary meanings with respect to the mother. Murphy discusses other aspects of phantom limb phenomena in relation to the body ego.