The Embodied Analyst

From Freud and Reich to relationality

Jon Sletvold

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415856195
• eBook ISBN: 9781317859932
• Topic: Psicología
• Subtopic: Salud mental en psicología

2015 Gradiva Award Winner

The Embodied Analyst brings together the history of embodied analysis found in the work of Freud and Reich and contemporary relational analysis, particularly as influenced by infant research. By integrating the 'old' embodied and the 'new' relational traditions, the book contributes to a new clinical perspective focusing on form and process rather than content and structure – the 'how', rather than the 'what' and the 'why'. This perspective is characterised by a focus on movement, emotional interaction and the therapists own bodily experience in the analytic encounter.

Jon Sletvold presents a user-friendly approach to embodied experience, providing the history, theory, training and practice of embodied experience and expression as a way of expanding clinical attention. Starting with a Spinozan view of the embodied mind, Part One: History of Embodied Psychoanalysis presents an overview of the history of the field in the works of Freud and Reich as well as a look at the Norwegian Character Analytic tradition . Part Two: Conceptual Framework and Clinical Guidelines explains how clinical interaction can be navigated based on the embodied concepts of subjectivity, intersubjectivity and reflexivity. Part Three: Embodied Training and Supervision presents innovative approaches to training in emotional communication inspired by the performing arts. The book ends with a consideration of the embodied analyst in the 21st century consulting room.

Capturing key aspects of a transitional movement in the development of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, The Embodied Analyst is ideal for those working and training in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Chapter 1
The embodied mind

The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body

(Spinoza)

It is my fundamental belief that experience is essentially embodied experience. I see the mind, or better the minding process, as a continuing process of registering, feeling, and sensing (in ways I shall describe as intuitive and generally nonreflective) what is happening and changing in our body as we interact with our environment (with particular interest in other human beings). This internal processing of feelings and sensations registers as a sense or feeling of what is happening. My belief challenges the Cartesian conception of body and mind as separate realms or entities. Conceptualizing mind/body as mind and body is still common in psychoanalytic writing, even if it may not be intended for the most part. I therefore set out in this chapter what we might see as a Spinozan alternative to the Cartesian conception.

From the vantage point of post-Cartesian psychoanalysis, Stolorow (2011) and his coworkers have importantly criticized the idea of the isolated mind: “[o]ne isolated mind, the analyst, is claimed to make objective observations and interpretations of another isolated mind, the patient” (p. 20). They developed phenomenological contextualism to reunite the mind with its context, above all the outer world. From my Spinozan perspective, I emphasize just as strongly the need to transcend the separation of the mind, not only from the world, but also from the body. The focus of this chapter is actually more on the body in the mind than on the world in the mind. The notion of the contextualized mind is already widely accepted, at least in relational circles. The notion of the embodied mind might not be as widely accepted as yet.

Toward a psychoanalytic conception of the embodied mind

Bruce Reis recently made the following observation:

A revolution is underway. Disciplines as diverse as philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics and developmental psychology are redefining what it means to be human by sharing their respective knowledge bases, synergistically creating radically new conceptions of subjectivity and intersubjectivity. (2009, p. 565)

Reis speaks of a “wide-ranging theoretical synthesis … bringing new ways of thinking to psychoanalysis.” Consistent with the movement Reis describes, I shall be looking at the advantages of making use in clinical practice of research and theoretical formulations in fields related to psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, such as philosophy, neuroscience, and developmental and experimental psychology. I draw on these ideas to demonstrate the kind of emerging conceptual imagery or metaphors that help me integrate embodied experience in psychoanalysis. I begin with a clinical observation published in 1960 by Marion Milner:

[The] inner ground of being, as a real psycho-physical background to all one’s conscious thoughts can be directly experienced by a wide focus directed inwards. [This] kind of attention deliberately attends to sinking itself down into total internal body awareness, not seeking at all correct interpretations, in fact not looking for ideas at all although interpretations may arise from this state spontaneously. (Quoted in Wallin, 2007, p. 338)

Milner’s advocacy of this kind of (countertransference) attention to embodied experience came at a time when psychoanalytic culture lacked a theoretical framework to appreciate its value, and was unprepared to fathom the implications of what she was reporting. I want to consider a conceptual framework for twenty-first-century psychoanalysis enabling the kind of experience Milner was reporting. I start with something Freud wrote in 1898:

I am … not at all inclined to leave the psychology hanging in the air without an organic basis. But apart from this conviction I do not know how to go on, neither theoretically nor therapeutically and therefore must behave as if only the psychological were under consideration. (Masson, 1985, p. 326, my italics)

Even if Freud – temporarily – had to give up his ambition to achieve an organic basis for psychoanalysis, he didn’t forsake it altogether. Note for example what he wrote later on in The Ego and the Id: “The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego” (p. 26). What exactly Freud meant by this formulation remained, however, at best unclear and because of that, conceptions of ego and self in psychoanalysis in the twentieth century for the most part had no room for embodied experience. It is fascinating to consider how the ego of ego psychology, the self of self psychology, and the self-states of contemporary relational thought remained largely “hanging in the air without an organic basis,” contrary to Freud’s intentions and views as presented in The Ego and the Id.

In this chapter, I shall be looking at theoretical developments that have contributed to a grounding of the mind in the body in ways that Freud and others after him were not privy to when they formulated their ideas. For example, in the past few decades, neuroscientists have formulated new models to explain how a sense of self and other might emerge from embodied experience. New ways of understanding, ways which Freud the neurologist could only contemplate in part, are now becoming increasingly tenable.

Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, Damasio, and Stern

But first I need to take a big step backward in time, to Spinoza, who was the first to formulate a clear alternative to Descartes’ theory of body/mind. I shall then ask how Merleau-Ponty managed to situate the body – as opposed to sensation and reason – at the center of human experience (perception). By positioning the body at the center of experience, Damasio can explain how emotions and feelings constitute the core and source of embodied experience. I also introduce the work of Daniel N. Stern on vitality affects and forms of vitality, and how it expands our understanding of embodied affectivity. Taken together, the ideas of Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty, Damasio, and Stern justify closer clinical attention to affective, embodied experience. I end the chapter with a consideration of the reluctance that still seems to exist around the idea of the embodied mind.

A Spinozan alternative to Cartesianism

Damasio (2003) drew renewed attention to the remarkable fact that Spinoza, writing only some 30 years after the publication of Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy (1641/1992), formulated a distinctive alternative to Descartes’ view of the relationship between mind and body. In his Meditations, which Descartes dedicated to the “Dean and the Doctors of the Sacred Faculty of Theology at Paris” (p. 13), he claimed to have demonstrated “the existence of God and the distinction of the human soul from the body” (p. 12). Contrary to this view, Spinoza described in The Ethics (1677/1982) the human mind or soul (depending on the translation) as the idea of the human body. “The object of the idea constituting the human mind is the body and the body as it actually exists” (The Ethics, Part II, from the proof following Proposition 13). Spinoza saw the body and the external world as the basis of the mind. “The human mind does not perceive any external body as actually existing except through the ideas of the modification (affections) of its own body” (Proposition 26). In condensed form, Spinoza here explains why attention to embodied experience is so essential to the navigation of analytic interaction – and everyday life.

With the Cartesian view of body and mind as separate realms remaining the dominant view until recently, Spinoza’s alternate view, on the other hand, was heavily suppressed for centuries. He was excommunicated by the Jewish Synagogue in Amsterdam, condemned by Christian and political leaders all over Europe, and even attacked by the nonbeliever Voltaire.

Commenting on the fate of Spinoza, Damasio (2003) wrote: “Darkly, through the glass of his unsentimental and unvarnished sentences, Spinoza apparently had gleaned an architecture of life regulation along the lines that William James, Claude Bernard, and Sigmund Freud would pursue two centuries later” (p. 13). And almost 300 years later, philosophers would again formulate the view that the human body interacting with the external world grounds what we call mind. Building upon the phenomenology and existentialism of Husserl (1913/1989a, b) and Heidegger (1926), Merleau-Ponty argues that the seat of perception (mind) is to be found in our own body.

In Phenomenology of Perception (1945/1996), Merleau-Ponty starts out by discussing the traditional views of philosophy and psychology on how we come to know the world: empiricism and rationalism. The common point of departure for these conceptions is consciousness. Both, Merleau-Ponty argues, represent second-hand abstractions. Neither empiricism nor rationalism can explain how we come to perceive the world first hand. “Pure sensation … is the ‘last effect’ of knowledge … and it is an illusion … that causes us to put it at the beginning” (1945/1996, p. 37). At the beginning, he argues, is our own body. “It is a fact that I believe myself to be first of all surrounded by my body, involved in the world, situated here and now” (p. 37).

According to Merleau-Ponty, it is only from a given bodily position (real or imagined) that we can perceive anything at all. We can’t just see (or imagine) a house, we must see (or imagine) it from a specific bodily position. What we perceive will vary depending on whether we see the house from one side or another or from above. In Merleau-Ponty’s words,

My body is the fabric into which all objects are woven, and it is, at least in relation to the perceived world, the general instrument of my “comprehension”. … It is my body which gives significance not only to the natural object, but also to cultural objects like words. … The word “hard” produces a sort of stiffening of the back and neck, and only in a secondary way does it project itself into the visual or auditory field and assume the appearance of a sign or word. (p. 235, 1945/1996)

In short, my body is not only an object among other objects, a nexus of sensible qualities among others, but an object which is sensitive to all the rest, which reverberates to all sounds, vibrates to all colours, and provides words with their primordial significance through the way in which it receives them. … We are not, then reducing the significance of the word, or even of the percept, to a collection of “bodily sensations” but we are saying that the body, in so far as it has “behavioural patterns,” is that strange object which uses its own parts as a general system of symbols for the world, and through which we can consequently “be at home in” that world, “understand” it and find significance in it. (pp. 236–237)

Merleau-Ponty points to a fundamental distinction between, on the one hand, the “objective body” and mental representations, images of the body as object – the two Cartesian bodies – and, on the other, the body, “which is sensitive to all the rest.” One of the problems psychoanalysis has had with the body derives to a great extent from a conception of it as a physical or nonphysical entity, flesh and blood versus imaginings and fantasies – echoes of Cartesian dualism. In Merleau-Ponty’s vision of embodiment, the body exists for us first and foremost as immediate experience, “the object which is sensitive to all the rest.” Only at a second remove do we form conceptions, physical and/or mental, of the body.

Merleau-Ponty’s basic argument, then, is that we come to know ourselves and the world in which we live not from “sensation” nor from “objective thought,” but from “the pre-objective realm” constituted by the experience of our own body. This is also his starting point for considering how we get to know other selves, a view that presages current positions:

What we said about the body provides the beginning of a solution to this problem [how we get to know other selves]. The existence of other people is a difficulty and an outrage for objective thought (p. 346). … If my consciousness has a body, why should other bodies not “have” consciousness? Clearly this involves a profound transformation of the notions of body and consciousness. As far as the body is concerned, even the body of another, we must learn to distinguish it from the objective body as set forth in works on physiology. (p. 351)

As the passage below will show, Merleau-Ponty’s explanation of intersubjectivity also pre-echoes the results of developmental research on alter-centric participation (Bråten, 1998b) and infant imitation (Meltzoff & Moore, 1995). On this reading, it is from our own body that we come to understand the existence of other minds. He writes,

Here again I have only the trace of a consciousness which evades me in its actuality and, when my gaze meets another gaze, I re-enact the alien existence in a sort of reflection. There is nothing here resembling “reasoning by analogy.” … A baby of fifteen months opens its mouth if I playfully take one of its fingers between my teeth and pretend to bite it. And yet it has scarcely looked at its face in a glass, and its teeth are not in any case like mine. The fact is that its own mouth and teeth, as it feels them from the inside, are immediately, for it, an apparatus to bite with, and my jaw, as the baby sees it from the outside, is immediately, for it, capable of the same intentions. “Biting” has immediately, for it, an intersubjective significance. It perceives its intentions in its body, and my body with its own, and thereby my intention in its own body. (p. 352)

Referring to Husserl and his statement that the perception of others is like a coupling phenomenon, Merleau-Ponty adds: “The term is anything but a metaphor. In perceiving the other, my body and his are coupled (p. 118). … It is as if the other person’s intention inhabited my body and mine his” (p. 185). Merleau-Ponty here presages a view of intersubjectivity that has recently been given the term intercorporeity, inspired by the discovery of so-called mirror neurons, as a basis for embodied “knowing” of others (Gallese, 2009). And Reis (2009) made the following relevant connection, stating that “there is also a crisscrossing of bodies, the other and my own. Merleau-Ponty … called this a chiasmatic relation, wherein my body and the body of the other are both instances of the same corporeal process that runs throughout the sensible/sentient world” (pp. 571–572).

Merleau-Ponty’s reading of intersubjectivity more than half a century ago also anticipated current relational views concerning the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis. He wrote:

Psychoanalytical treatment does not bring about its cure by producing direct awareness of the past, but in the first place by binding the subject to his doctor through new existential relationships. It is not a matter of giving scientific assent to the psychoanalytical interpretation, and discovering a notional significance for the past; it is a matter of reliving this or that as significant, and this the patient succeeds in doing only by seeing his past in the perspective of his co-existence with the doctor. (1945, p. 455)

Contemporary conceptions of the embodied mind

In recent years, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 The embodied mind
• PART I History of embodied psychoanalysis
• PART II Conceptual framework and clinical guidelines
• PART III Embodied training and supervision
• Concluding remarks and future directions
• References
• Index