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Humans are fundamentally embodied! Analysts, starting with Freud, have implicitly endorsed this statement. Yet, it is only within the last two decades that conjectures about the ways in which embodiment affects psychoanalytic theory and practice have appeared in our literature. In this issue we have gathered articles by some of the leading proponents of what we see as a widespread movement toward an embodied perspective in psychoanalysis.
The variety of the authors’ takes on embodiment reflect how difficult it is to pin down exactly what makes the concept so important for our thinking and our work. It may well be that all the approaches are needed.
It seems fitting to begin this issue with an introduction by Melvin Bornstein to a brief commentary and two clinical “stories” that Joseph Lichtenberg sent to us only months before he died. His inspiring commitment to embodiment is exemplified in these unfinished pieces.
Donnel Stern has advanced some of the most widely used concepts in contemporary psychoanalysis including “unformulated experience,” “dissociative enactment” and “the interpersonal field.” It is the relation of these phenomena to embodiment that Stern explores for the first time in his article. He persuasively argues that positing the fundamental role played by the nonverbal does not detract from the importance of the verbal. His clinical example illustrates the role of embodied processes in the formulation of experience.
Siri Gullestad sees the new emphasis on embodiment as stemming from cognitive science research. However, she traces its deep roots in psychoanalysis back to the Norwegian character analytic tradition that emphasizes nonverbal behavior and “body language.” Through her clinical example, she explores how a patient’s embodied, structuralized bearing and bodily appearance reveal relational messages. She introduces her concept of “relational scenario” as a helpful way to observe transference-countertransference dynamics.
Using two clinical vignettes