Somatic Countertransference as Evidence of Adhesive Identification in a Severely Traumatized Woman

This paper discusses the use of somatic countertransference as a means of learning about the patient, about projective and adhesive identification and about the object relating nature of the most traumatized and withdrawn part of the personality. It assumes an elemental knowledge of British Object Relations and uses clinical material to illustrate the hypotheses that somatic countertransference is an indicator of a very elemental communication occurring from the aspect of the psyche that is united in a body mind or mind body. The paper assumes that this body mind was object seeking at birth and perhaps before. Because these early aspects of the personality are non verbal and non conceptual, the analyst must rely not only on the verbal material in a session but on the emotional and sensual experiences within the transference and the countertransference. Such reliance requires a faith in one’s own intuition without a certainty that one is “right.” Because speaking of such early experience is difficult, often writers and analysts appear more certain than they are. This is a hazard of this type of analytic work. What I am writing about is conjecture or imagination or dream, but I am suggesting that such dream work is a valuable tool for analysis.     

The mind‐body relationship in Pāli Buddhism: A philosophical investigation

The Suttas indicate physical conditions for success in meditation, and also acceptance of a not‐Self life‐principle (primarily viññana) which is (usually) dependent on the mortal physical body. In the Abhidhamma and commentaries, the physical acts on the mental through the senses and through the ‘basis’ for mind‐organ and mind‐consciousness, which came to be seen as the ‘heart‐basis’. Mind acts on the body through two ‘intimations’: fleeting modulations in the primary physical elements. Various forms of rūpa are also said to originate dependent on citta and other types of rūpa. Meditation makes possible the development of a ‘mind‐made body’ and control over physical elements through psychic powers. The formless rebirths and the state of cessation are anomalous states of mind‐without‐body, or body‐without‐mind, with the latter presenting the problem of how mental phenomena can arise after being completely absent. Does this twin‐category process pluralism avoid the problems of substance‐dualism?     

Descartes' dreams

Abstract: René Descartes is often regarded as the ‘father of modern philosophy’. He was a key figure in instigating the scientific revolution that has been so influential in shaping our modern world. He has been revered and reviled in almost equal measure for this role; on the one hand seen as liberating science from religion, on the other as splitting soul from body and man from nature. He dates the founding of his philosophical methods to the night of 10^th November 1619 and in particular to three powerful dreams he had that night. This article utilizes Descartes' own interpretations of the dreams, supported by biographical material, as well as contemporary neuroscientific and psychoanalytic theory, to reach a new understanding of them. It is argued that the dreams can be understood as depicting Descartes' personal journey from a state of mind‐body dissociation to one of mind‐body deintegration. This personal journey may have implications for a parallel journey from Renaissance to modern culture and from modernity to post‐modern culture.     

The Conceptual Fetters of the Mind-Body Problem

The crux of our encounter with the mind-body problem originates from a predicament on the underlying ontological level—from the category of concepts, it seems that the form for grasping the subjective aspects of the mind is incommensurable with the one for understanding the objective level of the brain. This is reflected in the fact that empirical expression is restricted by language, that psychological events cannot be incorporated into strict laws, and that the subject has a path that, with his own mental state, others cannot share. In order to make progress in cracking the mind-body problem, this paper tries to abandon the assumption that “psychology” and “physics” are mutually exclusive and are incompatible ontological categories. The “mind” and “body” are considered as two interchangeable yet non-coexisting perspectives. Therefore, events in the body are represented as conceptions in the mind, and have an expressive correspondence with one another. Meanwhile, the approach for achieving such correspondence involves the entity itself—the ability of the organism to perform purposeful activities constitutes the source of its internal activities. Through the connection of life categories—or rather, the coupling of living beings and their worlds—the mind and body maintain mechanisms which can be jointly realized.     

Mind and space: a Confucian perspective

This essay explores the Confucian concept of the space of the mind and the Confucian view on cultivation of the space of mind. It then argues that the distinction between the mind as a mental substance and the body as a material substance is that the mind can be infinitely extended while the body can only extended to a certain limit.     

Some Eighteenth Century Contributions to the Mind–Body Problem (Wolff, Taurellus, Knutzen, Bülfiger and the Pre-Critical Kant)

This work speaks about very special solution of the mind–body problem. This solution based on the so-called Principle of Co-existence stands out as one of the most interesting attempts at solving the mind–body problem. It states that substances can only exert a mutual influence on one another if they have something in common. This does not have to be a common property but rather, a binding relationship. Thus, substances co-exist when they remain bound by a common relationship, for instance, to an external subject. The Principle of Co-existence played an extremely important role in Kant’s philosophy, not only since it provided a framework for solving the mind–body problem, but since it captured the very basis of its existence. The Principle found also reflection in the works of Kant’s successors, such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel or Feuerbach. It had significant—though often hidden—repercussions on later philosophy of mind. The notion of force and the principle of its operation became key concepts in resolving the mind–body problem. As a result, philosophy of mind concentrated on the search for a principle explaining the occurrence of two complementary types of phenomena. This established a tradition which, to a greater or lesser extent, has survived to our day.     

A response to Maggie Turp's paper from a body psychotherapy perspective

Whilst appreciating the quality of containment in Turp's work as a learning point for the Body Psychotherapy tradition, the author argues that Turp does not represent a psychotherapeutic way of ‘working with the body’. This would require a deconstruction of the body/mind dualism inherent in much psychotherapeutic (and psychodynamic) theory, so that the complexity of the spontaneous and reflective body/mind processes, especially in their polar extremes (body/mind dissociation – body/mind integration / ‘psyche/soma unity’), can be contained. An holistic body/mind formulation of countertransference is approached by which – rather than being used as a gratifying or cathartic therapeutic shortcut which avoids the intensity of the transference – the body can be seen to constitute an avenue into the full experience of the transference/countertransference process and its relational sources in early development.     

Beyond design: cybernetics,biological computers and hylozoism

The history of British cybernetics offers us a different form of science and engineering, one that does not seek to dominate nature through knowledge. I want to say that one can distinguish two different paradigms in the history of science and technology: the one that Heidegger despised, which we could call the Modern paradigm, and another, cybernetic, nonModern, paradigm that he might have approved of. This essay focusses on work in the 1950s and early 1960s by two of Britain’s leading cyberneticians, Stafford Beer and Gordon Pask, in the field of what one can call biological computing. My object is to get as clear as I can on what Beer and Pask were up to. At the end, I will discuss Beer’s hylozoist ontology of matter, mind and spirit. This material is not easy to get the hang of—but that is what one should expect from an unfamiliar paradigm. Presented at an international conference on the philosophy of technology, Copenhagen, 13–15 Oct 2005. Revised for submission to Synthese.     

Griesinger's psychiatric approach

The standpoint from which Griesinger considered mental illness and the closely connected relationship between body and mind is described. The conclusion is drawn that Griesinger, realising that body and mind form an entity with the brain as an organ and psychological processes as its function, regarded mental illness as an organopathological process. This played a great role in raising psychiatry to the status of the purely somatic fields of medicine.     

Hannah Arendt,evil and the eradication of thought

Evil deeds may be committed intentionally or out of madness, but it is those who follow orders that present us with the most complex moral, philosophical and psychological questions. In writing about the banality of evil, Hannah Arendt argues that “in granting pardon, it is the person and not the crime that is forgiven; in rootless evil there is no person left whom one could ever forgive.” Arendt postulates that “being a person” necessarily entails the acts of memory and thought. This paper explores Arendt’s ideas on memory and thought and how these processes can become subverted in the service of a higher order. Clinical material illustrates Whitmer’s idea of dissociation as an “impairment of subjectivity” as distinct from Freud’s view of dissociation as a form of repression. This shift in theoretical perspective sheds new light on our understanding of the totalitarian state of mind, i.e. of the mind of a “nobody”, and the conditions within which evil is committed.     

The Self as a Relational Structure A Dialogue with Multiple-Self Theory

This paper addresses the postmodern critique of unified-self theories that argues that the self is not unified but multiple, not a static entity but in constant flux, not a separate center of initiative but intersubjectively constituted. The author proposes that there are two kinds of division in self-experience: the dissociative divisions of multiple-self theory, and a division, akin to the divisions between Freud's structural agencies, between what are here termed the “intersubjective self” and “primary subjective experience.” In contrast to dissociated self-states, which occur in different moments in time, these two dimensions of self-experience occur simultaneously; indeed, what is most important about them is their relationship. The author suggests that it is this intrapsychic relationship, as it occurs in a given psychological moment, that determines the qualities of self-experience that are emphasized in unified-self theories: such qualities as cohesiveness versus fragmentation; authenticity vs. falseness; vitality versus depletion; optimal versus nonoptimal self-regulation; and agency versus feeling one is at the mercy of others. Furthermore, a major organizer of the intersubjective self is early identifications, especially “identifications with the other's response to the self.” The implications of these concepts for therapeutic action are discussed and illustrated with an extended account of an analytic case.     

中国古代儒道思想中的具身认知观

身心合一论是中国古代思想的基本观念。身是以“气”为根基, 并通过“修身-修心”与“修心-修身”可至天人合一的身体。本文选取中国古代思想中最有代表性的儒道两家思想, 融合现象学视角来诠释中国古代儒道思想中的身体观对身体主体性的生动凸显, 以及从“身-心-世界”三者互为交涉的层次上所建构的特有的认知观。随着国内外学者对具身认知观的日益关注, 结合中国古代思想视角开展的具身认知研究可在促进中国心理学发展的同时促进具身认知研究范式的成熟。     

Early trauma and affect: the importance of the body for the development of the capacity to symbolize

In this paper I aim to outline the importance of working clinically with affect when treating severely traumatized patients who have a limited capacity to symbolize. These patients, who suffer the loss of maternal care early in life, require the analyst to be closely attuned to the patient's distress through use of the countertransference and with significantly less attention paid to the transference. It is questionable whether we can speak of transference when there is limited capacity to form internal representations. The analyst's relationship with the patient is not necessarily used to make interpretations but, instead, the analyst's reverie functions therapeutically to develop awareness and containment of affect, first in the analyst's mind and, later, in the patient's, so that, in time, a relationship between the patient's mind and the body, as the first object, is made. In contrast to general object‐relations theories, in which the first object is considered to be the breast or the mother, Ferrari (2004) proposes that the body is the first object in the emerging mind. Once a relationship between mind and body is established, symbolization becomes possible following the formation of internal representations of affective states in the mind, where previously there were few. Using Ferrari's body‐mind model, two clinical case vignettes underline the need to use the countertransference with patients who suffered chronic developmental trauma in early childhood.     

Spinoza on Composition,Causation, and the Mind's Eternity

Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind is often understood as the claim that the mind has a part that is eternal. I appeal to two principles that Spinoza takes to govern parthood and causation to raise a new problem for this reading. Spinoza takes the composition of one thing from many to require causal interaction among the many. Yet he also holds that eternal things cannot causally interact, without mediation, with things in duration. So the human mind, since it is the idea of a body existing in duration, cannot have an eternal part. In order to solve this problem, I propose an aspectual reading of Spinoza's doctrine of the eternity of the mind: the mind itself is eternal, under one of its aspects.     

Dualism in medicine,Christian theology,and the aging

Distinguishing a person's soul or mind from a person's body describes dualism, the philosophical premise that fails to integrate the person as one, but instead leaves the person as two, usually as souland body or as mindand body. In dualism, one tends to think of the soul or the mind as the person and the body as an appendage. I argue that 1) dualism is rampant in medicine; 2) that Christian theology has fundamentally opposed it, and 3) that cultural dualism today threatens the aging in particular. To deal with this threat, I argue that the moral task of being human is to become one in mind and body. That is, I argue that the unity of the person which is the unity of the mind and body is not really a metaphysical given, but rather the goal or end of being human.     

The dual aspect of fantasy: Flight from reality or imaginative realm? Considerations and hypotheses from clinical psychoanalysis1

This paper discusses the view that fantasizing, understood as a flight into fantasy, belongs to a type of mental functioning distinct from imaginative fantasy. From this the idea emerges, proposed by Winnicott, that withdrawal into fantasy assumes a dissociative quality, which is formed early on as a defensive solution following the loss of hope in object relations. Such a defence becomes the foundation for a dangerous enclave in which the individual ends up enclosing himself, experiencing an illusory self-sufficiency. In this perspective, the author maintains that the flight into fantasy must be understood as a risk factor for the draining of the self or for a crystallization into psychopathological structures, becoming an automatic activity of 'non-thought' that substitutes for the working-through processes necessary for the development of the mind. The paper investigates this psychopathological dynamic, which was already present in Breuer and Freud's writings, examining subsequent contributions of various authors. Clinical material (of both children and adults) illustrates how the flight into fantasy may take the form of an anti-relational realm of the mind, compromising the operations necessary to the integration of psychic life. There is also a discussion of which therapeutic tools may help the patient to gradually abandon the withdrawal in favour of an authentically nourishing relational nature.     

D. W. Winnicott,transitional objects and the creation of the divine

Religious expressions and religious behaviours are often considered to be mainly mental or spiritual phenomena, to a large degree divorced from or threatened by physical or material forms that may accompany their expression. This paper asks whether the diminution of the material or the condemnation of idols, icons and religious art loses sight of possible benefits that involvement with these forms of material divinity has for believers. Using the concept of transitional objects and transitional phenomena developed by D. W. Winnicott, a mid-twentieth-century psychoanalyst, I argue that idols, icons and religious art often represent transitional objects that form psychological bridges, intermediaries or anticipated “transitions” from humans to unseen divinities who require materialisation in some form to be maintained actively in the believer’s mind. In the process of creating or designing these material forms, the forms themselves often come to be considered “divine”. Illustrations are provided.     

The form of the soul ― on the body in Freud’s psychoanalysis

To formulate the problem of the relation between body and soul in terms of how one should understand the relation between consciousness and the brain, or in terms of explaining how mind can arise out of matter, is a modern and far from innocent tendency that has instigated the whole spectrum of theories and answers suggested by the philosophy of mind of the so-called Analytic tradition during the 20th century. During the last 5 decades, we have seen a number of attempts at incorporating Freud into this discussion about the relation between body and soul. In this article, the author develops an argument according to which the philosophy of mind of the Analytic tradition is not really an appropriate intellectual environment for Freud´s theory of the body and its constitutive rôle. Rather, we should turn to phenomenology and transcendental philosophy where the body is thematized, not in terms of matter taken to give rise to consciousness in an empirical sense, but rather in terms of the “lived body” that is taken, in a transcendental sense, to constitute the organization of meaning in our conscious and our unconscious psychological life. On the basis of an outline of this phenomenological theory, the author argues that Freud, most of all in his theory of psychosexual development, thematizes the body as the form of the soul.     

Sandplay in Jungian analysis: matter and symbolic integration

Jung described a way of thinking, tied to sensations and feelings, that is a thought connected to the body. Again in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Jung (1954) speaks of the symbol as a 'live body', corpus et anima. If the mind cannot credit itself with the discomfort that manifests through the body, this is a sign of a separation between mind and body. A consequence of all this is the literalization of the discomfort which makes it impossible to have a symbolic dimension. Therapy activates a process in which the patient can move from a stage of separation to a possible connection between mind and body, resulting in changes in the level of communication and of awareness. The mind opens itself to symbolization and the body becomes a field for a common language. From our reflections we have come to ascertain that we can speak of analysis only when an imaginary space is achieved, an intermediate space between the patient and the analyst, a space that is created from the intertwining of the symbolic capability of the patient with that of the analyst. Focusing our attention on the use of sandplay in analytic therapy, we know that one puts in the sand box objects that are marks of our psyche, visible traits that contain actions, corporeal movements and feelings. When one focuses on the overall representation built, one can go beyond the literal image and the analyst, keeping alive the image through his symbolic capability, opens the possibility of a dialogue with the symbolic dimension. The imagination as a symbolic thought is the humus that allows the analyst to maintain the intermediate symbolic level open by activating a symbolic process within the dialectic of the analysis.     

On matters of mind and body: regarding Descartes

In this paper the author considers Descartes’ place in current thinking about the mind‐body dilemma. The premise here is that in the history of ideas, the questions posed can be as significant as the answers acquired. Descartes’ paramount question was ‘How do we determine certainty?’ and his pursuit of an answer led to cogito ergo sum. His discovery simultaneously raised the question whether mind is separate from or unified with the body. Some who currently hold that brain and subjectivity are unified contend that the philosopher ‘split’ mind from body and refer to ‘Descartes’ error’. This paper puts forward that Descartes’ detractors fail to recognise Descartes’ contribution to Western thought, which was to introduce the Enlightenment and to give a place to human subjectivity. Added to this, evidence from Descartes’ correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia supports the conclusion that Descartes did in fact believe in the unity of mind and body although he could not reconcile this rationally with the certainty from personal experience that they were separate substances. In this Descartes was engaged in just the same dilemma as that of current thinkers and researchers, a conflict which still is yet to be resolved.