ABSTRACT
The Body Observational Diagnostic Interview (BODI) probes key historical relationships, critical junctures in the making of femininity and gender, body development, pregnancy, and sexuality. Just as the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) has been used as a tool for assessing attachment styles and the capacity for self-reflection, the BODI opens a portal to unsymbolized and dissociative experience as well as reflective thinking on the body. This chapter focuses on the growth in body-based difficulties; the intergenerational transmission of body-states; and, repositioning the gendered body in analytic thought and in clinical work. It examines the Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA) that uses a rich description of the semantic data to emerge from the participant's narrative, and embodying gender. Adding a nonverbal analysis to the BODI supports both the experience of the clinical body as well as the growing interest in analyzing embodied experience in the fields of philosophy, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, neuroscience, and infant mental health.
