Through the Eye of the Needle: the Unfolding of the Unconscious Body

Abstract

The body is the starting point of experience and the original source of psychic life. In the course of analysis "the camel" must "go through the eye of the needle," in the sense that the body must become the specific object of mental working through, although no link between the corporeal and the mental can be taken for granted. The body-mind relationship is explored in the light of Matte Blanco's hypothesis that symmetric and asymmetric relationships are always present in the mind in differing proportions, and that the realm of symmetry is the deep unconscious. In primitive mental states the body may be completely unperceived: just as H. G. Wells's invisible man could be seen only when dressed, so the body appears on the mind's horizon only when asymmetric thought is directed at it. Three clinical vignettes show the contribution of the body-mind relationship to the overcoming of serious impasses in analysis.

Corona Virus, Social Distancing, and the Body in Psychoanalysis

“…One patient tells me: “I watched a terrifying TV show that searched for those responsible for the epidemic, the guilty ones who did not do enough to prevent it: a machine that only generates terror and hatred. I had to switch it off to protect myself from my own anxiety.” Above all, in the patients most vulnerable to guilt and internal paranoia, exposure to the tragic news of the pandemic led to the necessity of an unfolding (Matte Blanco 1988; Lombardi 2009, 2015) of the distinction between body and mind, between external and internal reality, between objective tragedy and the imagined fear of an attack by an offender. There, where the “symmetry” (Matte Blanco 1975) of the unconscious tends “like an acid” to cancel distinctions, the psychoanalytic task was to promote distinctions that stimulated discrimination, thought, and emotional containment.…”

The body one has and the body one is: Understanding the transsexual’s need to be seen

“…Work with these individuals requires a particular attunement to the body self and to the bodily countertransference so that it becomes possible to construct “a language to enable corporeity to speak” (Lombardi, 2009, p. 370). It is, of course, vital not to shame the patient by exposing prematurely, through the verbal medium, what the body silently yet forcefully expresses.…”

The body, adolescence, and psychosis

“…This in turn leads to catastrophic outcomes of non‐containment, since the topological subversion of this relationship and the collapse of the container makes it impossible ‘to contain and transform that persecuting infinity that arises in the body ’ (Bria and Lombardi, 2008, p. 719, our emphasis). In terms of Freud’s biblical metaphor from the Studies on Hysteria (Breuer and Freud, 1893–95), during adolescence the body and the experiential turmoil associated with it must necessarily pass ‘through the eye of the needle’ of consciousness (Lombardi, 2009a). If, as Freud wrote, ‘the ego is first and foremost a body ego’, the disappearance of a mental representation of the body firmly anchored in the ego (Freud, 1923) threatens the asymmetry that is fundamental to the mind–body relationship, as well as to the functioning of the container/contained relationship.…”