ABSTRACT

By viewing psychoanalysis through the lens of embodiment, Brothers and Sletvold suggest a shift away from traditional concept-based theory and offer new ways to understand traumatic experiences, to describe the therapeutic exchange and to enhance the supervisory process.

Since traditional psychoanalytic language does not readily lend itself to embodied experience, the authors place particular emphasis on the words I, you, we and world, to describe the flow of human attention. Offering new insights into trauma, this book demonstrates how traumatic experiences and efforts to regain certainty in one’s psychological life involve profound disruptions of this flow. With a new understanding of transference, resistance and interpretation, the authors ultimately show how much can be gained from viewing the analytic exchange as a meeting between foreign bodies.

Grounded in detailed case material, this book will change the way therapists from all disciplines understand the therapeutic process and how viewing it in terms of talking bodies enhances their efforts to heal.

chapter |8 pages

Bodies in time

An introduction

chapter |7 pages

Foreign bodies

From interpretation to translation

chapter |13 pages

Traumatized bodies

chapter |8 pages

Embodying dissociation

chapter |10 pages

The us-them binary of fascist experience

chapter |9 pages

Body-based supervision

chapter |9 pages

Why not the body?

chapter |1 pages

Coda