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The origins of Body as Psychoanalytic Object go back to the 12th annual British Object Relations Conference, held in Seattle in 2018. The volume's focus is on the works of D. W. Winnicott, W. R. Bion, and other object-relational theorists. Bion's concepts of atonement, catastrophe, and primordial sensory-perceptual-somatic experience and Winnicott's ideas about the undifferentiated maternal immersion and mirroring required to help the infant comprehend meaning, themselves demonstrate a keen interest in the body. The editors and authors attempt to integrate such concepts with their clinical experience, carefully attending to their patients' somatic, affective, and behavioral expressions—to the embodied emotional intensity of and in the analytic encounter.
As Bion (1962) pointed out, psychoanalytic objects—sometimes unknowable—are what analysts must detect during an analysis.
Two central questions are posed: Is there enough clinical evidence to propose that body's ability to communicate unconsciously within oneself and with others is independent of symbolic thought? What is the importance of somatosensory experiences that are located bodily?
The volume is divided into six parts, each with a separate editors' introduction. Part I, “Mind-Body Relations in Winnicott, Bion, and Beyond,” argues that, in the psychoanalytic discourse, the works of Winnicott and Bion have been seminal in highlighting the significance of the body as an integral part of the analytic encounter. Lesley Caldwell's clinical examples in “Being After Winnicott: Minding the Body, Embodying the Mind” shed light on the body (of both the analyst and analysand) as a source of communication and meaning. Similarly, in “Does Body Have a Mind?,” Robert Oelsner delves into Bion's theories of the mind and the dialectic of the “container-contained,” wherein bodily experiences of containment and transformation play a crucial role in the psychic organization and integration of emotions and thoughts. Oelsner is ad