The Somato-Psychic Realm

Influenced by the groundbreaking work of Wilfred Bion, The Somato-Psychic Realm: Analytic Receptivity and Resonance sees 10 internationally acclaimed psychoanalysts explore the complex interrelationship between our psychic and somatic selves, and highlight its promising riches and devastating disruptions.

Explored theoretically and illustrated with vivid clinical examples, the contributors in this volume map our current understanding on the fascinating subject of psychic and somatic selves, reframing it as the ‘somato-psychic realm’. This collection of essays brings together the current thinking, reflections, and clinical understanding of prominent Bionian psychoanalytic practitioners and scholars, from Rudi Vermote to Judy Eekhoff, each of whom have developed particular interests and expertise in analytically approaching the realm of the somato-psychic. The reader is offered extensions of theory and vivid clinical examples and invited to consider many questions central to contemporary psychoanalytic practice: Does the body think and if so, how does the analyst converse with it? Is thinking in a psychoanalytic sense best conceived of as a combined function of the soma and psyche? How does this perspective reorient analytic technique? Can we conceptualise a body-to-body dimension of the analytic experience, and in the analytic encounter how does this dimension serve a vitalising function for the patient while remaining outside of the usual verbal and symbolising exchanges between analyst and patient? What is the fate of failures and disruptions in the somato-psychic interrelationship and how does the analyst hear, recognise, and respond to these failures? How does the analyst make subjective space to experience in herself the presence of these disruptions? What transformations in our technical stance does this type of clinical presentation require? As they approach the challenges of the somato-psychic realm, readers will find themselves drawn into this conversation, invited by a thought-provoking foreword by Patrick Miller.

It will be a vital resource for psychoanalysts in training and practice alike looking for a greater recognition of and ability to respond to problems ranging from frank somatic disorders to failures in symbolisation and thought process and the non-neurotic states of mind that accompany these disorders.

David G. Power is a founding member of The Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies (BGPS), a past President, Supervisory and Teaching Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and on the faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. With Howard Levine, he co-edited Engaging Primitive Anxieties of the Emerging Self (2017). He maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and supervision in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dolan Power is a founding member of the Boston Group for Psychoanalytic Studies, Past President, Supervisory and Teaching Analyst at the Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis and on the Faculty of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. She was awarded the Francis Tustin Memorial Prize in 2011 for her paper “The Use of the Analyst as an Autistic Shape” (IJP 2016). She maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis, consultation and supervision in Cambridge, Massachusetts