March 16, 2022 "Body as Enemy: The Risk of Coming Alive" with Drew Tillotson, PsyD, FIPA, BCPsa

Being and staying emotionally alive in the clinical hour is not always easy nor a welcoming experience. At times the analyst’s aliveness collides with patients’ anxieties, their psychic walls, or dead spaces. Hopefully, these encounters penetrate psychic barriers and awaken nascent or truncated development. For some patients the process of enlivening is experienced as dangerous, risky, destabilizing: a Bionian ‘catastrophic change.’ In this presentation, an analytic case is used to illustrate the impact of a chronic bodily illness on the patient’s object world and its interdigitation with struggles to come alive, both psychically and bodily. For Tillotson's patient, illness sealed an early object identification with a dead parent that preserved an un-mournable object tie, blocking emotional aliveness and bodily vitality. Thus, coming alive engendered significant risks. Transformations were unconsciously dreaded due to an inability to mourn an object tie that shaped the patient’s internal life. To successfully mourn and become psychically alive, the patient had to face anxieties linked to bodily pleasure, mental excitement, and experiencing the analyst as an enlivening object. The ensuing catastrophic change involved relinquishing deadening object ties and manic flights into a phantasied disease-free body.