ABSTRACT
In health, the experience of being bodied and the experience of being minded are inseparable qualities of the unitary experience of being alive. Achieving this kind of sense of aliveness is particularly problematic when early childhood experience has led the individual to create a pathological form of mindedness that is disconnected from experiences in the body. This chapter explores a sequence of interventions and responses that took place in the fourth year of a highly successful thirty-eight-year-old attorney. Prior to the analysis, the patient had never spoken with anyone in any depth about the molestation. The patient's life as a child was, to a large degree, a life of endless story-making and daydreams, into which he retreated. This state of mind, which served as a substitute for life in the external world and in his body, was unpredictably disrupted by the neighbor's molestation and by the demands posed by his mother's depressed moods and implicit suicidal threats.
