November 17, 2021 "Embodiment, Dissociation, and the Rhythm of Life" with Peter Goldberg, PhD, FIPA

The way one lives in one’s body is a decisive factor in psychical life. It vitally affects the sense of ‘realness’ of our existence and of the world around us. But how are we to take account of the life of the body in the clinical situation? Traditionally, psychoanalysis has thought of the body mainly in terms of what the mind does with it (e.g. managing the drives through repression, or using the body for symbolic purposes, as in hysterical conversion symptoms). However, in the wake of Winnicott’s recognition of psyche-soma, we may now wonder about the psychical life of the body itself. Can we conceive of the body’s distinctive patterned existence along the lines of patternmaking, contiguity, rhythm, tone, texture, and coloration? With this theoretical backdrop in mind, Goldberg’s presentation explores two themes. First, the fact that the body is, of course, not a singular thing. His concern is not so much with the biological body of the drives or with socially constructed specular body identities. Rather, Goldberg's interest is the psycho-sensory dimension, where bodily experience is fundamentally trans-individual, shaped as habitus in the cultural domain of unconscious communal perception. Second, he considers the clinical challenges posed by body-mind dissociation or disembodiment and the ways in which the analyst is called to respond through embodied engagement, enabling a re-induction of shared psycho-sensory experience with patients who have been cut off from the rhythms and patterns of communal sensoriality.