The Psychosoma and the Psychoanalytic Process

Abstract

The difficulties of being human oblige us to create an infinity of psychic structures to bind or in some way cope with the inevitable physical and mental pain we are going to encounter. We have to start doing this shortly after birth and are only able to do it because of a unique phylogenetic heritage: the capacity for symbolic functioning. Most of our psychic pain is occasioned on the path to acquiring individual status and personal identity followed by the acquisition of our sexual identity. Freud was the first to emphasize the essentially traumatic nature of human sexuality while Klein and her disciples have thrown light upon the earlier traumata inherent in the process of separating one's image from that of the primordial Other in order to become a person. We must find answers early on to the conflicting claims of instinctual life and reality demands which these processes bring in their wake, and for the rest of our lives much of our psychic energy will be directed towards maintaining the solutions we have found. Some of these solutions make life a creative adventure while others are maintained at the expense of psychic, and eventually somatic, well-being. Anthropologists such as Levi-Strauss postulate that sexual laws of some kind are inherent in any social structure in that they are the minimal requirement for distinguishing a social group from a herd such as may be found in brute nature. In psychoanalytic theory insight into the complexities of social and sexual integration is attained through the concept of the oedipus complex, the notion of castration anxiety and of the symbolic structures to which they refer. These relatively sophisticated structures are intricately bound up with language and indeed could not exist without it. Beyond them lies the darker, infra-verbal and pregenital area, less weighted semantically (which, therefore, led Freud to designate this the prehistoric part of the individual's psychic story). In this early phase psyche and soma might appear to coincide although the extensive charting of these laboriously mapped areas of the mind (the principal cartographers after Klein being Winnicott and Bion) tend to show that the psyche grows out of the soma almost from birth. To attain the primitive psychosomatic level of existence is rather like trying to recreate the experience of original awareness as mystics do. Any research into psychosomatic pathology must struggle with the unknowns of this early phase of psychic functioning. The psychic material which enters into the primordial fusion of mother and nursling is composed of smells, sounds, and visual and tactile sensations. These are in themselves despatializing factors and this no doubt favours the setting in motion of one of the earliest of psychic mechanisms, subsumed under the concept of projective identification. These mechanisms will dominate until such time as language spatializes and limits the psychic structure, thus delimiting the inner and the outer world, while at the same time the infant begins to inhabit his soma. He becomes embodied. Little Oedipus comes to terms relatively late with the problems caused by the difference between the sexes, the narcissistic mortificatiom of the primal scene and the relinquishment of his erotic and aggressive