The Memory of the Flesh: The Family Body in Somatic Psychology

Abstract

Family traditions take a somatic turn in a therapeutic practice that focuses on how symbolic bodies are passed down in families. Somatic psychology holds that parents offer children models of how to be in the world, which takes the form of bodily attitudes. The body shapes I imitate and resist at every stage of life arise out of the memory of the past, incarnate memory in the present, and project the memorial body towards its future. I materialize in my body the ghosts of my ancestors. This is a study of how flesh remembers.

Breaching the wall of traumatic silence: Holocaust survivor and descendant person–object relations and the material transmission of the genocidal past

“…She does not seek factual documentary knowledge of why or when or who did this to her father but, rather, if ‘it hurt’ or if ‘it scare[d] him’. Ricki longs for what Young (2002: 25) describes as a shared experiential world via the ‘memory of the flesh’. Ricki’s memory work with the tattoo thus clearly recalls Latour’s (1996) ‘actant’, the object whose ‘relational will or force’ affects Ricki as agent, as she interacts with her father ‘through material culture in the practices of everyday life’.…”

Texts, Bodies, and the Memory of Bloody Sunday

“…There seem to be two sorts of mechanisms by which such transmission might be achieved. One might be more strictly “bodily”—the sort of preconscious inculcation of identity markers as occurs, for instance, with gender (see, e.g., Young 2002). Given the tectonic shifts in forms of memory noted above, however, it is hard to imagine that this sort of transmission would remain in our time purely doxic (Bourdieu 1977): even preconscious bodily memories seem likely to be culturally thematized as orthodoxy or heterodoxy by someone somewhere.…”

Sensorial Memory

“…Katherine Young (2002) for example describes somatic therapy, where the therapist reads and interprets a patient's bodily gestures and postures as inherited "ways of being-in-the-world" that materialize in the body (2002: 45). Bodily memories of interpersonal parent-child distressing relations imprinted on the body allow therapist and patient to engage with the past and work through "family-body" relations.…”