Psychosomatic symptoms, embodiment and affect Weaving threads to the affectively experienced body in therapy with a neurotic and a borderline child

Abstract

In the treatment of patients with psychosomatic symptoms, the restoration of the link with the affectively experienced body is of crucial importance. The affectively experienced body is the seat of emotional life and the basis upon which words and language can process the meaning of emotions. We will focus on the restoration of the link with the affectively experienced body in a neurotic patient and in a patient with a borderline character structure. In the course of the therapeutic process, intense countertransference feelings, often experienced on a bodily level, are important indications of the aspects of affective life that have been ejected or foreclosed by the patient with psychosomatic symptoms. If the therapist can contain the primitive affects that have been ejected by the patient, then these affects can be ‘digested’ and given back or communicated to the patient in a tolerable and meaningful way. Thus, the patient can reintegrate aspects of his affective life and rebuild the link with the bodily seat of his affects. Becoming (re)connected with ‘the affectively experienced body’ is a therapeutic process with significant differences on the neurotic and pre-neurotic levels. Restoring the link with the affectively experienced body for the child with a neurotic character coincides with repairing the contact with the self, for the child with the borderline patterns, it gradually helps to build up this contact with the self. For psychoanalytic theory, this emphasis on embodiment or ‘bodiliness’ and affect is of crucial importance in that it completes an emphasis on finding words for affects. An interplay of restoring the link with the affectively experienced body — in itself a process in which language plays an important part — and finding words for what is felt on a bodily level enriches analytic theory and improves the prospects of therapy for psychosomatic patients.