ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the reader is introduced to the central role of the body in traumatic experience. Because Chapter 1 showed us that trauma requires that we understand how the body remembers the trauma, this chapter examines what the body’s role is. Here, we make connections between what Ricœur later develops as the ‘psychical’ and the ‘material’ realities. In trauma, psyche and bodied matter continuously connect to create the experience of affect. Drawing on the work of Bessel van der Kolk and Peter Levine in particular, this chapter explores the vital interconnection between material and psychical realities. It also looks at how the body relates to itself, with reference to Stephen Porges’ polyvagal theory. Understood as a situation of isolated suffering, trauma requires practitioners and theorists to examine the embodied somatic relation. It requires that we understand the complex interconnection between bodied and mind states.
