Body Mind Entanglements
Working with unrepresented somatised states in the intersubjective space
This webinar was recorded and is now available as a Talk on Demand. Click here for more details.
Friday 3 December 2021
With Geraldine Godsil, Salvatore Martini and Antonio de Rienzo
CPD Credits: 4 hours
- Includes a recording of the event with access for a year (14 days post the event)
- Bookings close at 9:00am GMT Tuesday 30 November
This day will present views on psychotherapeutic experiences which illuminate the bodily basis of intersubjectivity. The speakers will elaborate their understanding of the intersubjective space as a field of ‘mutual unconsciousness’, where the two people in the therapeutic relationships meet and transform.
READ MORE...In particular, they will explore how the inarticulate emotions lodged in bodily experience re-emerge in the shared field of the therapy relationship for both participants.
During the seminar we will examine how such somatic language is felt, registered, and contained by the therapist, and what it reveals. We will see how ways of attending to and being with those sensorial effects in the countertransference can enable deeper access to unformulated knowledge about the patient’s past that would be otherwise impossible to reach. A major theme linking all three presentations is the presence of dissociation in both patient and analyst and how to work with the profound body/mind split that is often linked to early trauma.
FULL PROGRAMME
14.00 GMT (09.00 EST)
Introductions
14.10
Geraldine Godsil
Residues of a Symbiotic Somatic Countertransference and Growth of the Analyst
This presentation explores residues of a somatic countertransference that revealed its meaning several years after an apparently successful analytic work had ended. Psychoanalytic and Jungian analytic ideas on primitive communication, dissociation and enactment will be explored in the working-through of a shared respiratory symptom between patient and analyst. We will hear how growth in the analyst was necessary for the patient’s communication at a somatic level to be understood. Here, Geraldine takes a second look at the communicative and possibly healing aspects of analytic work in an undifferentiated area of mind/body using field theory, Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology and José Bleger’s assertion that both the patient’s and analyst’s bodies are part of the setting.
14.45
Responses from Antonio de Rienzo and Salvatore Martini followed by Q&A with participants
15.15
Break
15.30
Salvatore Martini
The Embodied Reverie of the Therapist and the Archetypal Field of Interaction
This presentation considers the transfer of somatic effects from patient to analyst that gives rise to embodied countertransference, functioning as an organ of primitive communication. By means of projective identification the analyst experiences somatic disturbances that are connected to the split-off complexes of the analysand. The analyst’s own attempt at mind-body integration ushers the patient towards a progressive understanding and acceptance of his or her inner suffering. Such experiences of psychic contagion between patient and analyst are related to Jung’s “psychology of the transference” and the idea of the ‘subtle body’ as an unconscious shared area. The re-attribution of meaning to pre-verbal psychic experiences within the embodied reverie of the analyst enables the analytic dyad to reach the archetypal energies and structuring power of the collective unconscious. We shall consider how to work with this in the clinical setting.
16.15
Q&A
16.30
Break
17.00
Antonio de Rienzo
Primitive States of Unintegration, Working Through and the Birth of the Analytical Subject
This contribution starts from the idea that when the analytic field is saturated with unintegrated psychic content, the analyst’s somatic countertransference is a precious indicator of a deep, dissociated form of communication. Antonio’s hypothesis, based on a closely described clinical experience, suggests that the transference field may be made of distinct layers – psychoid, affective, verbal – and that each one of them may convey dissociated, even contrasting bits of information. The analyst, he proposes, should be ready to experience such conflicting sensations, feelings and thoughts at the same time. This attitude might foster a multifaceted reverie, which will bring up a new relational perspective.
17.45
Q&A
18.00
Panel Session and Q&A
18.30
End