Holding and touch in psychotherapy « what a shrink thinks. Michael (a highly fictionalized/conglomerate but all too real client) was scared as hell and little more than a month away from aging out of the group home he had lived in. At the close of the session he was trembling. I had seen him twice a week for the very first three years of my private practice (many many years ago now) and I had fielded at least as many hours of emergency and crisis phone calls. Hired as an independent contractor by the group home agency, I had watched him, week after week, grow from a gangly coltish boy, into a young self-identified gay man, as tough as he was pretty. He had no one. His parents, both severely mentally ill, profoundly sadistic, and long gone.
He had lived in an undisputed, unfathomable house of horrors, tortured and feral, until he was removed at age 7. He reported being harassed by homophobic staff and peers, called a “girl” a “she-male” and much much worse because of his carriage, style and orientation. I wanted to spare him even more loss. Self-Bound-Contain. T & F Online. MeltzerIntro. Intrusiveness and Intimacy in the Couple. Imprisoned Pain & Its Transformation: Joan Symington: 9781855752436: Amazon.com.
"Psychotherapy with Psychotic Patients" - Part 1. Hitchcock and the Cinema of Sensations: Embodied Film Theory and Cinematic ... - Paul Elliott. The Violence of Emotions: Bion and Post-Bionian Psychoanalysis - Giuseppe Civitarese. Skin in Psychoanalysis - Jorge Ulnik. Martin Schmidt on Psychic Skin. "Psychoanalytic practice and theory is fundamentally concerned with boundaries and containment. This requires the establishment of semi-permeable, flexible membranes that can create space, hold and control the passage of that which goes in and out.
The consulting room and its furniture, the building that it is in, the person of the analyst, the words we choose, the silence, the transference and the analytic hour itself, all provide a kind of metaphorical ‘skin’ for the analysis. Freud states that ‘the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiefly from those springing from the surface of the body’ (1927, p. 26). In her seminal paper, Esther Bick (1968) argues that in its most primitive form, the parts of the personality are held together by the skin functioning as a boundary. Following in Bick’s footsteps, Joan Symington (1985) describes how the baby lives in constant fear of its psychic skin being breached and spilling out into ‘unintegrated states’. The 'body-container': a new perspective on ... [Int J Psychoanal. 2009. Body, Breath, and Consciousness: A Somatics Anthology. The Embodied Self: Movement And Psychoanalysis - Katya Bloom. Emotion and movement. A beginning empirical-phenomenological anal.
Buy & download fulltext article: Abstract: Three methodologically distinctive empirical studies of the emotions carry forward Darwin's work on the emotions, vindicate Sperry's finding that the brain is an organ of and for movement, and implicitly affirm that affectivity is tied to the tactile-kinesthetic body. A phenomenological analysis of movement deepens these empirical findings by showing how the dynamic character of movement gives rise to kinetic qualia. Analysis of the qualitative structure of movement shows in turn how motion and emotion are dynamically congruent. Three experiences of fear are presented--phenomenological, ethological, and literary--to demonstrate the dynamic congruency. Five implications follow from the analysis, including the implications that movement is not equivalent to behavior, experience is not physiological activity, and a brain is not a body. CG Jung Page - A Skin for the Imaginal.
Symbolic attitude and reverie: problems of symbolization in child. Buy & download fulltext article: Abstract: In comparison to the 1970s and 1980s, we now treat more children and adolescents who, because they have had traumatic experiences of violence, child abuse, deprivation or chronic physical illness, are not able to adequately use their symbolizing function. The question is which qualities and which analytical attitude we should and can offer in analysis to help a child regain his or her capacity to symbolize, irrespective of how poorly developed or blocked this capacity may be.
In contrast to Jung and some Jungians, the author argues that although the transcendent function is a ‘natural process’ and hence archetypally grounded as Jung maintained, the transcendent function does not work spontaneously. British Journal of Psychotherapy 13.