Meetings of the New York Psychoanalytic Society

January 30, 1973. POSTURE, GESTURE, AND MOVEMENT IN THE ANALYST: CUES TO INTERPRETATION AND COUNTERTRANSFERENCE. Theodore J. Jacobs, M.D.

The use of video tape and frame-by-frame analysis of film has made possible an increasingly sophisticated study of bodily movement as a means of nonverbal expression. Dr. Jacobs postulates that when in tune with his patient's unconscious, the analyst's own posture, gestures, and movements may act as nonverbal associations to the material he is hearing. The analyst's observations of his own nonverbal behavior may then be used to pick up clues about the patient's unconscious meanings and assist him in interpretation.

Three clinical examples were cited. In the first, an adult male reported an attack of anxiety related to the diapering of a friend's infant. While listening to the material, the analyst found himself fingering his belt and tugging at it as though it were too tight. He connected this to the patient's anxiety and recalled that at age four the patient had developed an umbilical hernia which was treated by a tight bandage, a source of pain and anxiety. In a second case, the analyst's stroking of his mastoid bone while a patient described a feeling of lightheadedness and dizziness on the couch clarified a traumatic mastoidectomy which had not been fully revealed in the analysis. In the third case, a patient's longing for her ex-husband and for a father who had abandoned her in childhood was detected when the analyst noticed that he was rubbing his wedding ring, a representation of closeness and union, in an empathic response to her loneliness.

The analyst's bodily responses are also useful in helping him monitor hidden attitudes of anger, resentment, competition, or sexual attraction; they also help in identifying elusive countertransference elements. Moreover, the analyst's kinetic responses reflect a bodily aspect of the empathic response that is related to the use of the body as a prime conveyor of affect between