ABSTRACT
A tradition is always in the process of becoming one, and the Independent tradition, initially the group of non-affiliated analysts of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Some sort of 'message' can therefore be sent back along the same track by way of the body to the mind, which constitutes a communicative link in the psyche-soma. The potentiality of affect is invested with new meaning, where the movement within the analytic process determines the technical imperative to register impressions of emptiness on the one hand and, on the other, to reclaim the experience of 'nothing happening' by revitalizing the occasion of coexistence. The 'puzzling leap' from soma to psyche, which formed an essential part of Freud's conviction that symptoms are meaningful, is put to work beyond the Freudian paradigm of hysteria, on the grounds that intersubjective communication – making sense together – provides new clinical possibilities for the more recalcitrant difficulties in the analytic encounter.
