ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the ways in which the body’s psychical interior is established as such through the social inscription of bodily processes, that is, the ways in which the “mind” or psyche is constituted so that it accords with the social meanings attributed to the body in its concrete historical, social, and cultural particularity. It discusses psychoanalysis in terms of its radical presumption of a correspondence or correlation between the forms of the body and the forms of mind or psyche. The chapter focuses on the contributions psychoanalytic theory has made to understanding how the body functions, not simply as a biological entity but as a psychical, lived relation, and the ways in which the psyche is a projection of the body’s form. It also focuses on three aspects of Freud’s understanding of psychical functioning: his notions of the ego, his conception of sexual drives, and his accounts of psychical topography.
