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Understanding the relationship between the mind and the body has been a mystery for scientists, philosophers, and theologians since humans first began questioning the meaning of life. It was this mystery that drove Freud to discover psychoanalysis and theorize that the drives were forces that bridged the body and mind. In this issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry, we guide the reader into the very same mystery, only with a century and a half of psychoanalytic experience.
We begin with Jane Lewis’s article, “Bodies in Dialogue: Empathic Connectedness in the Realm of the Unspeakable,” which is about a treatment of a traumatized man with long periods of silence. Because of the mutuality within the treatment relationship, Lewis can demonstrate the silence as nonverbal communication in the response to trauma. The trauma infuses the body and mind, which become part of the therapeutic relationship that includes the transference. Communication about the patient’s present, past, and transference becomes the source of transformation that leads to change by bridging the mind and body in both patient and Lewis.
The contributors to this issue had the challenge to turn to the richness of contemporary psychoanalytic thinking to discuss the clinical material of the mind-body connection and unconscious communication. Of great importance have been the insights from infant-mother interaction, where body and mind play such an important role; the advances in understanding early mental life such as the development of mentalization, the structure of the Self from Self Psychology and a Self as an agency that brings us closer to conceptualizing the person as central in interaction and engagement has altered the landscape of mental life.
The usefulness of conceptual tools that are now available to communicate and understand unconscious communication has been challenging. This is especially true within the realm of intersubjectivity, where self and other, different affects, past and present, objectiv