ABSTRACT
The chapter describes how fantasies of bodily contact can arise in the consulting room leading to primitive persecutory anxieties about the destruction of the self.
Psychoanalysis was born with the body, the corporeal symptomatology of women, and the author notes the ever-present possibility of physical contact between analysand and analyst. Freud's term Organsprache indicates how bodily phenomena may express what cannot yet be said. The author gives examples of the body making its presence felt in both analyst and analysand. And yet the body has almost disappeared from modern psychoanalytic writing.
Two countertransference dreams illustrate the significance of the analyst's body in conjunction with the associated clinical case. The second dream brings an insight that would not otherwise have been available to the analyst.
But such insights carry the risk of omnipotence, of a spiral circularity of interpretation. Also, the patient's overwhelming physical presence suggests basic unity. In this case, the insight alerts the analyst to the fact that the patient has not yet reached an Oedipal level.
The film ‘Crash’ is cited to demonstrate the occasional need for physical impingement or enactment in order to bring about a change in analyses conducted with certain highly challenging patients.
Another case, a patient who cuts herself rather than feel psychic pain, illustrates the fact that, when analyst and analysand come explosively together, it is not always possible to “make the best of a bad job.”
