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Psychoanalysis has often been described as having an ambiguous view on the role of the body in its clinical work. Freud’s early clinical work was with hysteric patients exhibiting a lot of dramatic somatic symptoms. But his interest was in the hidden meaning of these symptoms. The best way to reach the meaning was to go via free association. The words became the main focus of interest for Freud and the early psychoanalysts. After the Great War, several psychoanalysts tried to defy Freud’s therapeutic nihilism, among them Ferenczi and Reich. This also meant giving more weight to the patient’s body and the way she/he expressed the words in the cure.
As is well-known Reich spent five years in Norway in the late 1930s. His legacy there is not forgotten. In 1999, the Norwegian Character Analytic Institute was established. Jon Sletvold, who is a training and supervising analyst at that Institute, has written a very interesting book – The Embodied Analyst. From Freud and Reich to Relationality (Routledge, New York and London, 2014). Of course you could as well state that “life is embodied” and no one could contradict that. The interesting question is what will the conclusions be of stressing that the analyst is embodied? The book is one answer to that question.
The first chapter of the book, on the embodied mind, is a very good summary of recent critique of Cartesian dualism and the alternative mind-body holism from Spinoza over Merleau-Ponty to Damasio.
In the next chapter, Sletvold contrasts Freud’s and Reich’s approach to clinical analysis. Reich’s emphasis was on trying to read the expressions of the body and thus read the mind. He focused on the patient’s resistances to analysis and coined the concept of character analysis. From my Swedish point of view, Reich was of interest as a freudo-marxist in the leftist upheaval after 1968. His later development with orgasm-theory and orgone-therapy disqualified him as a serious thinker.
Norway and Sweden are close and good neighbo