Body as Psychoanalytic Object

Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond

Caron Harrang, Drew Tillotson, Nancy C. Winters, Caron Harrang, Drew Tillotson, Nancy C. Winters

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000423624
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Winner of the 2022 Gradiva® Award for Best Edited Book!

This book explores the role of bodily phenomena in mental life and in the psychoanalytic encounter, encouraging further dialog within psychoanalysis, philosophy, and the humanities, and contributing new clinical and theoretical perspectives to the recent resurgence of psychoanalytic interest in the body.

Presented in six parts in which diverse meanings are explored, Body as Psychoanalytic Object focuses on the clinical psychoanalytic encounter and the body as object of psychoanalytic inquiry, spanning from the prenatal experience to death. The contributors explore key themes including mind–body relations in Winnicott, Bion, and beyond; oneiric body; nascent body in early object relations; body and psychosensory experience; body in breakdown; and body in virtual space. With clinical vignettes throughout, each chapter provides unique insight into how different analysts work with bodily phenomena in the clinical situation and how it is conceived theoretically.

Building on the thinking of Winnicott and Bion, as well as contributions from French psychoanalysis, Body as Psychoanalytic Object offers a way forward in a body-based understanding of object relations theory for psychoanalysts and psychotherapists.

Part I
Mind–body relations in Winnicott, Bion, and beyond

1 Introduction

Caron Harrang, Drew Tillotson, and Nancy C. Winters

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195559-1

In this first part of the book, we offer two views of body as psychoanalytic object from Lesley Caldwell and Robert Oelsner, scholars in the published work of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion, respectively. Their critical engagement with these psychoanalytic luminaries gives us a fresh look back at Winnicott’s and Bion’s contributions through the lens of bodily phenomena as well as pointing the way forward to the constantly evolving ‘beyond’ in psychoanalytic theory and clinical technique.

Lesley Caldwell begins her chapter “Being after Winnicott: minding the body, embodying the mind” with an evocative quote from Didier Anzieu (2016) to introduce her exploration of how, until more recent times, psychoanalytic interest in the body has been largely disregarded: “In Freud’s time it was sex, but in the [1980s] it was the body that was ignored” (p. 23). Caldwell primarily utilizes the work of Donald Winnicott and Wilfred Bion to elucidate how the body was not incorporated or developed by prominent theoreticians of post-Freudian, British psychoanalysis. By also integrating insights from authors not belonging to the British School, Caldwell constructs an investigation into how the body in psychoanalysis has been mainly overlooked until recent times due primarily to the theoretical privileging of conscious and unconscious processes, an analytic “insistence on the capacity to think, to reflect, to mentalise as the foundations of psychic awareness” without including the consanguinity of body and mind. Caldwell acknowledges Winnicott’s and Bion’s direct concern with the body in their theoretical contributions was not immediately obvious; they both—in similar and different ways—explored the term ‘being’ and its implications for what analysts do.

Caldwell’s most important contribution is her focus on the integration of the body into “what analysts do.” Her main interest is what actually occurs in the consulting room between patient and analyst beyond language and more in the realm of the body and “states of being” (Mawson, 2019, p. 79). She posits being with our patients can be very demanding, perhaps more demanding than thinking about them and with them through offering interpretations. Germane to her focus on inhabiting states of being with patients, her use of Winnicott’s concepts of “going on being” (1954, p. 274; 1960, p. 149) and “continuity of being” (1960, p. 54) are especially helpful in thinking about the discovery of one’s own body starting at infancy, which may later be evoked in the transference and countertransference during analysis. Caldwell pays particularly close attention in her chapter to theories regarding women’s bodies and the mother’s body, drawing upon the work of Rosine Perelberg and Marion Milner. In an especially fortuitous passage in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Caldwell invokes Carla De Toffoli’s (2011) conceptions of breathing in approaching some aspects of analytic work:

[breath] spreads throughout the body, goes beyond it and is not in itself containable, it moves freely from I to you, like the psychic, eluding the customs barriers of the single individual… necessitating a constant oscillation between being one and being two in the analytic pair.

(p. 601)

Caldwell describes an analytic encounter that evokes powerful feelings of hate, boredom, and helplessness on her part with wishes “to get rid of him” during two short periods of a patient’s analysis. She describes her countertransference as “intensely physical” and thinks it is related to her patient’s early mother–infant experiences. However, this insight is not enough to alter this somatic countertransference dynamic. Reflecting upon her discussion of the body in this chapter, Caldwell wonders what might have occurred with this patient had she been able to pay closer attention to the patient’s bodily impact on her at the time, hence to being with rather than knowing about.

Robert Oelsner’s title “Does the body have a mind?” is like a Zen koan, opening a kaleidoscope of possibilities with no easy answers. Oelsner’s exploration of what he calls “body mentality” and “somato-logic” evinces a central concern of this book, the role of body in generating meaning. He begins with a quote from Bion’s Memoir of the Future (1991): “MIND (speaking to BODY) What is that amusing little affair sticking out? I like it. It has a mind of its own—just like me” (p. 434). We are thus reminded, the amusing little affair that has shaped psychoanalytic theory since its inception truly has a mind of its own.

In Oelsner’s consulting room we meet Mark who has a sore neck. This material, Oelsner says, “brings in a condensed manner the whole history of the body in relation to the mind.” Mark insists his sore neck has no relation to his unconscious. He imagines his aging analyst would not complain of such pain. Mark’s associations are to other problems with his body, especially dislike of his penis, which he believes causes pain to others; there is confusion between his penis and his tongue which hurts others with words. Oelsner observes diverse meanings of Mark’s symptoms. To begin with his symptom is somatic (not psychosomatic) and evolves into a hysterical conversive phenomenon of being possessed by a sadistic sexual predator, and lastly hypochondriacal identification with an analyst in pain.

Oelsner further explores the distinction between somatic, hysteric, and hypochondriacal phenomena in a lucid review of psychoanalytic ideas about mind–body relations from Freud to Klein to Bion, noting Freud’s understanding of hysteria as “a disease of the nerves without fever” led him from neuroscience to a science of the mind. Also considered are the French somaticists Marty and de M’Uzan; Piera Aulagnier; and Donald Meltzer. Oelsner employs clinical illustrations from Freud and Klein. For example, the hypochondria of Freud’s Wolf Man (1918) is seen as an identification with his ailing mother. Oelsner adds, Klein later posits hypochondriacal anxiety “comes from an unconscious identification with objects that have been damaged as well as the damaged objects retaliating and damaging the inside of the body.” In Klein’s (1961) analysis of young Richard recovering from a sore throat, she shows there is “actual physical illness, hypochondria and hysteria,” making an often-neglected connection between hysterical symptoms and hypochondriacal anxieties.

In the second part of the chapter Oelsner reviews selected concepts relevant to ‘body mentality’ from Bion’s early, mid-term, and late work. Early Bion (1961), Oelsner tells us, posits a proto-mental system functioning at the body level “in which physical and psychological or mental are undifferentiated” (p. 101). Mid-term Bion describes how the evacuation of beta elements projected into the body causes psychosomatic symptoms. As an example, Oelsner’s patient Mr. K has indigestion. Oelsner wonders, “can the analyst speak to the indigestion so that his gastrointestinal system would understand?” Harrang’s chapter later in the book also takes up this question.

Oelsner quotes generously from Bion’s enigmatic late work Memoir of the Future (1991) in which Body and Mind are in dialog. However, they speak different languages, revealing an unbridgeable caesura between them. Oelsner concludes his incisive synthesis of Bion’s early, mid-term, and late views of body and mind with questions. “Can psychoanalysis tame these characters with their wild thoughts?” “Can the impenetrable diaphragm become a friendly contact barrier?” As Bion came to believe, Oelsner suggests the vertex of psychoanalysis is to “integrate parts of the self in discord” and the quest for language that “speaks to all, from Body to Mind.”

References

1. Anzieu, D. (2016). The skin ego (Trans. N. Segal). Karnac Books.
2. Bion, W.R. (1961). Experiences in groups. Tavistock Publications.
3. Bion, W.R. (1991). A memoir of the future. Karnac Books.
4. De Toffoli, C. (2011). The living body in the psychoanalytic experience. Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 80(3):595–618.
5. Freud, S. (1918). From the history of an infantile neurosis. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.). The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 17, pp. 1–124). Hogarth Press.
6. Klein, M. (1961 [1984]). Narrative of a child analysis: The conduct of the psycho-analysis of children as seen in the treatment of a ten-year-old boy. The Free Press.
7. Mawson, C. (2019). Psychoanalysis and anxiety: From knowing to being. Routledge.
8. Winnicott, D.W. (2016 [1954]). Character types: The foolhardy and the cautious: On funfairs, thrills and regressions, by Michael Balint. In L. Caldwell & H. Taylor Robinson (Eds.). The collected works of D. W. Winnicott (Vol. 4, pp. 273–278). Oxford University Press.
9. Winnicott, D.W. (2016 [1960]). The theory of the parent infant relationship. In L. Caldwell & H. Taylor Robinson (Eds.). The collected works of D. W. Winnicott (Vol. 6, pp. 141–158). Oxford University Press.

2 Being after Winnicott
Minding the body, embodying the mind

Lesley Caldwell

DOI: 10.4324/9781003195559-2

“In Freud’s time it was sex,” claimed Didier Anzieu (2016), “but in the eighties it was the body that was ignored. The body as a vital element of human reality, as a general, irreducible, pre-sexual given, as the thing that all psychical functions lean on analytically” (p. 23).

It is logical to oppose psyche and soma and therefore to oppose the emotional development and the bodily development of an individual. It is not logical however to oppose the mental and the physical as these are not of the same stuff. Mental phenomena are complications of variable importance in psyche soma continuity of being, in that which adds up to the individual’s ‘self’ (Winnicott, 1949, p. 254).

Contemporary psychoanalytic concern with the body followed the explosion of interest in the body in the human sciences in the seventies and eighties, and it is a development related to the body’s “eclipse,” to use Armando Ferrari’s (2004) word, in much post-war psychoanalytic theorizing, especially that of British object relations. As Ferrari himself pointed out, an eclipse is not a disappearance or an actual absence, since what is eclipsed is always there. Even in a total eclipse the object is there in shadow (il corpo viene posto in ombra, si eclisse: non sparisce (p. 278)).

In this chapter, I approach this eclipse from the British tradition, particularly the work of Donald Winnicott, but also that of Wilfred Bion, two theorists whose increasingly convergent interests have until recently been overlooked in London, if not in Europe and Latin America. I do not trace a complete trajectory of their work, but rather use it to introduce some related themes that are worthy of consideration, together with some insights from authors who do not belong to the British school. On the basis of the work of the Italian analyst Carla de Toffoli, I revisit a case of my own in which I speculate / free associate to material in which, despite my awareness of the patient’s bodily impact, I did not develop the possible meanings of what may have elicited my response at the time.

The foundations of psychoanalysis in the interrelation of body and mind, and the affective life of the patient being spoken through the body as in Dora’s use of her reticule as negating her denial of her masturbation, had Freud (1905) stating, “He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore” (pp. 77–78). And yet a major orientation of the discursive formations of post-war psychoanalysis did seem to overlook the impact of the body’s very bodilyness, as material presence, and as carrier of other dimensions of what being human means.

The noted anthropologist Mary Douglas (2002) claimed the body provides the primary symbolic system for signifying other aspects of personal and social life. She proposed two intimately related bodies, the social body and the physical body, with the experience of the physical body always linked with and dependent on changing perceptions of both. Boundaries and margins are central to her understanding of both social and physical bodies, but psychoanalysis also considers the psychological body and the impact of the unconscious meanings it carries. While the psyche’s participation in the symbolic systems clustering around the constitution of bodily boundaries and margins and the sense of interiority the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• General introduction
• Part I Mind–body relations in Winnicott, Bion, and beyond
• Part II Oneiric body
• Part III Nascent body in early object relations
• Part IV Body and psychosensory experience
• Part V Body in breakdown
• Part VI Body in virtual space
• Index