ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with how difficult life experiences are dealt with on a bodily level and how some of these processes can become chronic. In the first part, I introduce the way the body is involved in defence processes and specific forms of body defence. In the second part, I describe prototypical patterns of processing experience that develop out of defence and coping processes connected to conflicts and deficits in childhood and which, in the psychodynamic tradition of body psychotherapy, are called character structures.
