You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
In describing her work with her traumatized patient Antonio, Dr. Jane Lewis focuses on Barthes’s (1981) notion of a photograph as having the symbolic linking function of an umbilical cord, and emphasizes the notion of the punctum, the specific personal wounding detail in an image that connects to the viewer’s experience. This article discusses these ideas, which appear mystical to Lewis, in the contexts of the theory of multiple coding and the referential process, as well as recent advances in the fields of social neuroscience and embodied communication. In the early Arousal phase of the referential process, emotion schemas associated with painful events of the past are activated for both participants, in subsymbolic, embodied form. Antonio is largely mute and frozen; Lewis also feels herself freezing and disappearing. In the Symbolizing phase, Antonio begins to connect to dreaded experience of his past, and to tell memories, fantasies and dreams. Memories and images of her past, related emotionally to Antonio’s experience, are awakened for Lewis as well. Through their embodied communication and shared imagery, the therapist’s ability to find emotional meaning for her own painful experience appears to support the patient’s beginning to provide some meaning for his pain and dread. Related observations by Bollas and Arlow, and parallels to a case reported by Ogden are discussed.