Editorial

That the body is the starting point of mental functioning was core to Freud's (1923) own understanding of the development of the ego. As he famously put it, the ego is ‘first and foremost a body-ego; it is not merely a surface entity but it is itself the projection of a surface’ (Freud, 1923, p. 26), that is, the most primitive form of self-representation is first and foremost a body representation. Freud understood that psychic development is rooted in the body, and consequently emphasised the measure of the demand for work imposed on the psyche owing to its link with the body. Since then psychoanalytic practitioners have been committed to understanding the problematic relationship between the body and mind. Winnicott was especially attuned to the importance of the body for psychic development, observing that ‘The basis of a self forms on the fact of the body’ (Winnicott, 1970, p. 270). He was also mindful of the challenge presented by our embodied nature:

How easy it is to take for granted the lodgment of the psyche in the body and to forget that this again is an achievement. It is an achievement which by no means falls to the lot of all. (Winnicott, 1988, p. 122)

This ‘lodgment’ – Winnicott (1970) elsewhere referred to it through the somewhat poetic image of the ‘psyche in-dwelling in the soma’ – brings home the rootedness of mental structures in early sensory and affective experience (Fonagy & Target, 2007).

Psychoanalysis has a long, rich clinical tradition in the area of psychosomatic medicine through the examination of the struggle we all face representing our lived, embodied experience. This relies on the capacity to symbolise, which can be impaired or undeveloped for a number of reasons (Segal, 1957). Moreover, when our experience is of a traumatic, distressing kind, the capacity to represent it in a symbolic manner can be severely undermined. Here the body may become the canvas on which psychic pain is depicted. Understanding the possible and layered psychic