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The purpose (one is almost tempted to say “rallying cry”) of this book is to “reclaim the body.” For the contributors to this volume, psychoanalysis has historically confined its view of the body to drive theory, with the consequence that the relational viewpoint has abdicated the role of the body to classical theory. The editors and authors of this volume aim to redress this imbalance by offering a variety of relational viewpoints on the body. Central to the purpose of this book is the distinction between drive theory and the centrality of the body in psychological life. This volume sets itself in opposition to what the contributors regard as the reified and reductionistic view of the body employed by classical psychoanalytic theory. This book aims to bring the body back into psychoanalytic discourse without resorting to a simplistic biological basis of human life.
Although this is an edited volume, it has a clear thesis: the body is a relational construction, and, as such, the experienced body is at the heart of the psychoanalytic process. There seem to be two primary meanings the authors draw from this premise: the body cannot be separated from our embeddedness in meaning and a major part of the interactional nature of the psychoanalytic process involves bodily communication. According to the theoretical contributors to this volume, because the body is implicated in the matrix of human meaning, it can be experienced and conceptualized in many ways. The plural title of this volume reflects the fact that a variety of bodily experiences are described and elucidated.