The cerebral mind versus the body mind

Abstract

Lawrence argues that an early unconscious rejection of awareness of both internal psychic states and perceptual experience of the environment prevents the child from being grounded in their full psychic reality. This has a serious impact on identity development and is illustrated here by the case of a patient whose psychic survival depended on maintaining a very narrow and defensive base for his identity. His internal structure was based on the extreme separation of his ‘cerebral mind’ from his body and much of his ordinary lived experience. It was in his body that he located a state of extreme collapse and catastrophic anxieties, which were in part internalised maternal projections. Lawrence draws on Klein’s work on splitting, the later work of Bion and Britton and on Harfung and Steinbrecher’s work on the somatic countertransference. She considers how the analyst’s containment acts to allow the patient to recover the parts of himself that are deeply split off. As the analysis progresses, feelings can be identified and the unthought chaos, hitherto somatised, becomes more bearable. The patient is then able to tolerate some integration of the self, with the prospect of developing a more substantial sense of identity.