ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that in order to understand the dissociative states of Ms. D, it was essential to decode the language of her body and to connect it with visualizations, images and verbalizations in the transference. The reconstruction of original traumatic experience proved indispensable in helping Ms. D to understand the “language of the body” as it related to the heretofore gaps in the comprehension of her internal experience. Sadomasochistic pathology, according to Sheldon Bach, often follows a variety of childhood traumata which leads to an intensification of annihilation and/or castration anxiety. P. Ellman and N. Goodman have stressed that overwhelming affect is often the result of early trauma and inevitably leads to enactments that tend to bypass symbolic narrative. Labeling affect in the enacted dimension “brings clarity and further differentiation to traumatic experience and to the associated unconscious fantasies”.
