Holding and Visceral Attention: Bodily Concentration of an Analyst under COVID-19 Lockdown.

Abstract

This essay emerged from my clinical experience of working psychoanalytically by remote means due to the pandemic of COVID‐19. During analytic listening, in the absence of bodily togetherness and in the presence of heightened anxiety about survival, I turned my attention inwardly towards the interior of my own body and made a spontaneous gesture of doodling. These two moves, mental and bodily, both unintentional and unconventional to my analytic training, restored my psychic aliveness and facilitated the process of analytic holding. I will reflect on this particular experience using Milner's concepts: framed gap and the analyst's concentration of the body, which I further conceptualize as ‘visceral attention’. I consider it as a corporal counterpart of ‘free‐floating attention’. It is my contention that the concept of visceral attention has a wider implication for analytic technique in the ordinary psychoanalytic setting when uncertainty prevails in psychoanalytic treatment and with patients whose predicament is marked by body–mind split. The essay explores an analogy between visceral attention and doodling to hold the analytic process at a non‐verbal level. The blank paper and blank inside of the body stand for the ‘framed gap’, the negative space for a new symbol to emerge.