ABSTRACT
The body, bodily sensations, bodily experience, bodily metaphor, and bodily imagery play a central role in the psychoanalytic process. The psychoanalytic process, however, is often thought to be quintessentially an exercise in the use, development, and enhancement of reflexive self-awareness or psychological mindedness. In this chapter, I bring together these two broad areas of study: the role of the body in the psychoanalytic enterprise and the self-reflexive function of the mind: the clinical body and the reflexive mind. I focus our attention on the place of the body in the mind’s self-reflexive functioning, and the effects on the body when self-reflexive functioning is impaired. Extending this to the realm of the intersubjective, I will consider the mutual impact of the mind and the body on each other as the psychoanalytic situation entails two individuals jointly processing, experiencing, and reflecting on psychosomatic phenomena. Hence, whereas I have previously elaborated on a meeting of minds (Aron, 1996), here I describe the mutual interplay of body-mind and mind-body (Grotstein, 1997), a sort of return from a two-person psychology to Rickman’s original idea of a two-body psychology (cited in Balint, 1950, p. 123).
