Inside the Body: How the Science of Interoception Can Provide a New Understanding of Psychoanalysis

Our brains’ ability to attend to our internal body sensations (“interoception”) safeguards our physiological equilibrium and, in so doing, creates our emotional awareness, sense of well-being, and self-experience. To my mind, recent interoception research syncs nicely with basic psychoanalytic theory. It offers a potentially revelatory new understanding of how the analysis of transference “works” to create change. The “predictive coding” model probes the nitty-gritty of how our brains create negative, fearful expectations based on past experience and how these negative predictions actually create the feared negative outcome. Powerful early emotional experiences, which cannot be consciously remembered per se, continue to exist mainly as felt bodily sensations. The only way to access such early patterns (“predictions”) is through accessing somatic sensation. We must, therefore, explicitly help our patients learn to identify, reflect upon and verbalize internal bodily signals, so that early dissociated emotional experience, “stored” in the body, can be brought to the level of subjective experience. The more interoceptively aware we are, the more we can filter our patients’ communications through our own interoceptive awareness, and the more effectively we can help our patients “update” their predictions and enliven their emotional lives.