The Patient’s Experience of the Analyst’s Physicality: It’s What’s on the Outside that Counts

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this paper, I explore how patients’ experiences of their analysts’ physicality – conveyed in the concrete aspects of the analyst’s body, clothing, and office – can be a constructive domain of budding intersubjective engagement. This is both generally true, and of specific salience with narcissistically vulnerable patients, for whom states of psychosomatic unity are compromised, and with whom finding ways to be “usable” as objects can be elusive. At the same time, both members of the dyad can resist such inquiries and enactments despite their generative potential. I highlight how we analysts may shy away from pursuing these aspects of our patients’ transferences because of our own anxieties about how we do or do not want to be seen. Such anxieties and vulnerabilities can be heightened in this arena, given that the analyst’s physicality reflects both material constraints and fluid, unstable meanings derived from the shifting intersections between personal construction, relational context, and the broader sociocultural surround, particularly as it informs expressions of gender, race, class, and the like.