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PATRICK CASEMENT'S “Some Pressures on the Analyst for Physical Contact During the Reliving of an Early Trauma” (1982) presents a welcome opportunity to comment on several aspects of it within the overall topic of this special issue on touch. I intend to do this in the first part of this paper. The second part will be devoted to a critical evaluation of psychoanalytical body psychotherapy as propagated by some of its exponents. The last part offers some thoughts on the differences in regard to the subject and meaning of touch in the analytical work with children as compared with adults.
The link between the subject of touch and the classical rule of abstinence is an obvious one, and Casement indeed opens his paper with a reference to it, suggesting that exceptions might be considered in the case of deeply regressed patients. In the case of the patient he presents in his paper, one might argue that it was precisely his refusal—or rather the withdrawal of his offer—for her to hold his hand, if necessary, that plunged her into a deep regression that, at one point, reached psychotic proportions. It seems to me that, when the patient made the original request to hold Casement's hand “in order to get