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The contemporary clinic is awash with patients worried about their bodies—our suffering now continuously dissected and medicalized, located more and more directly within our bodies. Etiology and cure sidestep psychological experience in favor of direct bodily interventions. Confronted daily with patients who talk about themselves by talking about their bodies, is there any room left for the psychological at all, let alone the unconscious? From Soma to Symbol: Psychosomatic Conditions and Transformative Experience, edited by Phyllis L. Sloate, arrives into this scene, primal and unsymbolized, with a useful road map, a beginning, to think about how to conceptualize and work with this array of symptomology and to ask what psychoanalysis has to offer. Each author of the seven case studies included meditates on work done with patients suffering from these illnesses.
Psychoanalysis has always been rooted in our bodily experience; indeed, its beginning belongs to the hysterical body and its mysterious symptom that refused to speak a shared language, instead creating its own singular message to be decoded. This hysterical symptom, resignified for our times into a contemporary conversion disorder, was Freud's door into the unconscious: a body to be deciphered so as to understand the mind. This hysterical defense allowed people to survive themselves and their desires—a defense