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Body–Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis: Development after Bion by Riccardo Lombardi is a very important, challenging, and difficult book. At its heart is the author's belief that “psychoanalysis cannot survive except in a context that is open to the quest for new vertices that are in line with the experience of our most extreme analysands” (p. 168). He further asserts that “psychoanalytic research can acquire new impetus and explore new horizons only by starting from the pre-mental generative levels: the body” (p. 167, italics in original).
Lombardi's central thesis is that the body needs to be taken into account in psychoanalysis and psychic development as a concrete reality whose existence and limits must be integrated with and come into dialectical relationship with the infinite imaginative capacities of the mind. To do so, Lombardi contends, will require “a radical shift of emphasis, such that the interest of the body is not limited to its symbolic meaning or to related unconscious phantasies” (p. 38, italics in
original). He sees the body as “the container of subjective experience” (p. 24, italics in original), the potential source of our very sense of being (p. 34), and argues that our psychic relationship with our body provides the first, last, and most important confrontation with reality: “the groundwork for mental functioning” (p. 38) and the foundation for psychic development.
As Freud (1911)† and Bion (1970)† asserted, psychic birth and development begin with freeing “ourselves from the restrictive conditioning of sensory data dominated by the pleasure principle” (p. 174). This must be followed by the activation of
a functioning body–mind relationship, as a prerequisite for the setting in motion and continuation of mental functioning. This involvement of sensory data is necessary, both as a safeguard against the danger of self-referential and abstract thinking that loses all connection with the concrete levels of the personality, and as a protection o