ABSTRACT

When a body meets a body, no formal introductions are made. What are the feelings and ideas, conscious and unconscious, that go through our minds when we are looking at another person? As therapists, we focus on words but our bodies also speak. And, in a manner of speaking, there are actually always four, if not more, bodies in the room. Each partner in the analytic dyad has both a body as a material entity and a body as it expresses and symbolizes psychic life. For each person, the expressive and symbolic meaning of her own body and the body of the other changes with changes in her self-state. Yet most accounts of therapeutic process mention very little of what the bodies mean to each other. In the literature on eating disorders (ED), for example, while the patient’s body is a constant focus, little attention has been paid to the eects of the therapist’s body on the events of psychotherapy and the process of treatment.