ABSTRACT
We end our book with some ideas we hope you will want to take with you:
Psychoanalytic dialogues are conducted by talking bodies – sometimes with words and sometimes without them.
Bodies talk about I, you, we and world.
The flow of attention among I, you, we and world for one person complexly intermingles with the I-you-we-world flow for that person’s relational partners.
Traumatic experiences tend to slow or freeze the flow of I, you, we and world such that only one component comes to the foreground while the others slip into the background. This dissociative activity reduces the complexity and sensed uncertainty of lived experience.
Because we all live in a traumatized and traumatizing world, the flow of I-you-we-world is never completely fluid.
Many constitutional factors, including subtle neurological conditions such as ADHD and high-functioning autism, also interfere with the I-you-we-world flow.
The creation of binaries is another way in which experience is simplified in the aftermath of trauma. Binaries constrict world and limit how I , you and we interact with the world . We are all vulnerable to the us-them binary.
Psychoanalytic healing involves increasing the fluidity of the I-you-we-world flow for patients and analysts. This tends to be accomplished by means of enhancing the embodied we -connectedness of the analytic partners.
It is possible to learn how to increase one’s awareness of how bodies talk in psychoanalytic relationships. Such learning benefits from embodied supervision.
