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Volume 10, Number 1
January - June 2006

Physical sensations of the analyst as an approach to a new physical immage of the patient
Ursula Volz

SUMMARY

This paper deals with the relationship between psychomotory sensations and language. The physical experiences of the analyst (immobility at the beginning of the first session, the sensation of a vortex in the head during a regressive phase and a moment of disorganization) are included in the material to be analyzed. A further "resonance space" is therefore created within the psychoanalytic relationship in which the psychomotory experience leads to a reciprocal affective contact, to images, words and meanings developed empathetically. The verbal denomination of physical experiences and images developed constructively prepares the construction of new representations of the body, empathetic object and external reality. By accepting this psychoanalytic function and the new experience linked to it, the patient, here presented, experiences [on his own skin/on his own body?] a sensation that he never felt before. This leads to a new representation of his bodily self, separate from the maternal body. He is thus able to break a pathogenous bond with the persistent fantasy of union with the maternal body, including its haemorrhages. He therefore feels a whole - with body and soul. Thanks to this new representation, he can put on the same symbolic plane the experience with the analyst in the analytic space and the experience in the relationship with the primary object. He transforms his request for a true embrace into the experience of an "internal embrace". There is a gradual progress from pre-symbolic communication to symbolic communication. Thanks to this new psychic structure the symptomatology of gastric pain and "Don Giovanni-ism" is solved. From the language of facts, of symptoms and of the body (haemorrhages, forced promiscuousness), he arrives at the language of words.