Miming and Clinical Psychoanalysis: Enhancing Our Intersubjective Sensibility

Abstract

ABSTRACT We are deeply convinced that one cannot study the human soul and the human behavior as “a thing,” that a discourse in third person will never equate a discourse in first person, and that not all the human communication is understandable and translatable into conceptual thought. We will illustrate this assumption in a review of research that led us to the particular “technique” of miming after the session, never in the patient’s presence. At the beginning of the clinical case we will explain this technique in some detail. It seemed at first possible and then essential for us to have a therapeutic approach that would facilitate and deepen the communicative experience of two “acting bodies” relating with each other. We called this procedure Mimetic Understanding because the understanding it provides is vastly based on emotions and actions and is less based on conceptual thinking. In the psychoanalytic literature we owe much to Daniel Stern (in particular vitality affects), to Jessica Benjamin’s notion of rhythmic third, and to all the studies of Infant Research that point to rhythm as the first form of meaning (Sander, Stern, Beebe, Knoblauch, and many others).