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As one of many psychoanalysts seeking a deeper understanding of bodily experience both theoretically and, above all, clinically, I read with eagerness Sebastian Leikert’s edited volume The Bodily Unconscious in Psychoanalytic Technique. Working my way through the book’s diverse and at times theoretically demanding chapters, I experienced new insights regarding bodily phenomena in my own analytic work; for example, listening more closely to an analysand’s deep sigh or resonating with his sudden expression of a shooting pain in his arm. In this volume Leikert, known for his concept of encapsulated body engrams —unsymbolized states lodged in the bodily unconscious—brings
together ten authors: seven from Germany (including Leikert) and one each from Italy, France, and Poland. Each chapter offers both a theoretical framework and clinical illustrations, with some leaning more toward theory, others toward clinical material. For the English-language reader, one of the pleasures of this volume is gaining access to the ideas of authors not often translated into English, e.g., Christophe Dejours and Ulrich Schultz-Venrath, thus providing a valuable window into European literature on the body and psychosomatics not yet accessible in English.
As Leikert and other authors suggest—and I would agree—this book is timely. Leikert speaks to the “urgency of elaborating a psychoanalytic theory of the body-self and a treatment technique directed toward it,” emphasizing “the importance of working with both bodies in the room” (p. 3). Riccardo Lombardi similarly argues for a “renewed timeliness” of hypotheses spanning body and mind, which he relates to a “broader range of illness than what Freud contemplated in his day” (p. 32). He further notes the “many varieties of body-mind dissociation” in contemporary life, perhaps related to “deficient maternal care” (p. 33). I see this tendency toward mind-body dissociation intensifying not only in the internet age but even more so as AI becomes