ABSTRACT
A century after the Victorian era, and in honor of psychoanalysis’ 100th birthday, it is certainly time to celebrate embodiment and bring it to the forefront of our analytic minds. With the evolution of theoretical paradigms emphasizing the transference-countertransference duet, beyond the one-person drive model and with new data sources of infant observation, we are poised to embrace the paradoxes inherent in a mind-body continuum. Embodiment, viewed within the realm of transitional phenomena, invites us to awaken our senses and our own sensual bodily responses to our patients’ material, to help us attune as well to the rich data within the realm of body talk. Diane Ackerman (1990) puts it this way:
Our senses define the edge of consciousness, and because we are born explorers and questors after the unknown, we spend a lot of our lives pacing that windswept perimeter: We take drugs; we go to circuses; we tramp through jungles; we listen to loud music; we purchase exotic fragrances; we pay hugely for culinary novelties and are even willing to risk our lives to sample a new taste [p. xv] most people think of the mind as being located in the head, but the latest findings in physiology suggest that the mind doesn’t really dwell in the brain but travels the whole body on caravans of hormone and enzyme, busily making sense of the compound wonders we catalogue as touch, taste, smell, hearing, vision [p. xix].
