The development of psychoanalysis in the works of Freud, the critical acceptance of classical metapsychology and the proposal of particular ways of interpreting it, the introduction of new models indicating the path along which psychoanalysis has progressed, and Bion's attempt to convey the essence of the psychoanalytic experience have also meant that attention has been paid to the problem of the relationship between mind and body.

The conception of the body as an objective biological entity, an alternative limit to the mind and its neuropshysiological model of psychological learning, has been supplemented by a conception of the body as a function of the mind. The term “function of the mind” is to be understood both in the integrated sense of the body as a background to the representability of mental activity, and in the sense of the body as a means of expressing and communicating mental activity itself.