The Bodily Unconscious in Psychoanalytic Technique

The Bodily Unconscious in Psychoanalytic Technique explores how corporeality and body memory can be more strongly integrated into psychoanalytic work. This book brings together an international range of contributors to consider the bodily unconscious from different theoretical perspectives. Concepts from the work of Freud, Bion, Winnicott, Lacan, Laplanche, and Fonagy are developed with the aim of incorporating body memory into psychoanalytic technique. The contributors consider how severe and complex clinical states, dominated by bodily symptoms and disorganization, can be approached with methods that go beyond classical interpretation. The book includes ten case histories and discussion of key themes including transference and countertransference, feelings of corporeality and bodily sensations, and features clinical material throughout. The Bodily Unconscious in Psychoanalytic Technique will be essential reading for psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists in practice and training, particularly those interested in somatic approaches.

Sebastian Leikert is a psychoanalyst in Saarbrücken, Germany. He is a training analyst at the German Society for Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Depth Psychology (DGPT), and a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis and The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.

1. Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Corporeality - The History of Avoidance 2. The Crack in the Self of Chronic Pain Patients: The Emotional Processes Involved in the Development of Psychosomatic Diseases and the Consequences for Treatment 3. Body-Mind Dissociation and Transference onto the Body 4. How To Begin? 5. Accidents of Seduction and the Theory of the Body 6. Affect Dialog, Affect Debris, and Encapsulated Body Engrams: Some Reflections on Psychoanalytic Technique with the Bodily Encoded Unconscious 7. "My Body Runs Alongside Me Like Something I Don't Need." Bodily Sensations in the Development and Organization of Mental Structure 8. Mind the Gap: Mentalizing the Body 9. Corporeality and Dream-Talk 10. The Via Regia of the Rhizome: Paths in the Unconscious of the Psychosomatic Body 11. Mentalized Alterity: Psychodynamic Work with Bodily Countertransference