The Mother’s Body
In the Intersubjective Field
Recorded Saturday 20 November 2021
With Prof Lesley Caldwell, Prof Alessandra Lemma and Prof Jean Petrucelli
CPD Credits: 2.5 hours
The first impressions of another body, that of the mother, will lay the foundations for all future experiences of the embodied self in relation to another intimately connected person. From immersion in her uterus to the total physical dependency of infancy, this relationship lays down a life-long pattern of an embodied sense of self-and-other, and with that the development of mind.
All relational encounters include this sense of twoness, but when someone enters psychotherapy, this awareness may be greatly amplified in relation to the therapist’s own embodied self.
READ MORE...Developmentally early sensations, primitive anxieties, and desires may be intense. Yet by ‘using’ the body of the analyst as a dynamic variable between them, a deeper exploration of the mind is greatly enriched.
This conference will explore how therapy allows space for mutual bodily influence with consciousness, allowing us to explore the bodily aspects of communication in relation to the foundational mother’s body. This may be especially helpful for understanding patients who develop a symbiotic transference and for whom any variance in the analyst’s body is felt to be profoundly destabilizing. These considerations will be illustrated with clinical material.
FULL PROGRAMME
Professor Alessandra Lemma
Thinking about the Body in the Consulting Room: The Embodied Setting and the Symbiotic Transference
This clinically focused presentation will look at how the body of the analyst may be conceptualised as an embodied feature of the setting. This may be especially helpful for understanding patients who develop a symbiotic transference and for whom any variance in the analyst’s body is felt to be profoundly destabilizing. For some, when the separateness of the analyst’ reaches awareness because of changes in its bodily state, this can mobilize intense primitive anxieties. In such cases, we need to carefully consider the patient’s early relationships, particularly with the mother in order to understand their use of the body of the analyst as a setting ‘constant’. It is only when the body of the analyst can become a dynamic variable between them that it can be used by the patient to further the exploration of their own mind. These dynamics will be illustrated with clinical material.
Q&A
Prof Lesley Caldwell
Which Mother, Which Body?
This presentation will discuss the positioning of analyst and patient in the setting through the multiple temporalities made available in the analytic session and always at work in its dynamics. It will approach the clinical encounter through the extended discourses on the mother and the maternal, that form part of a general external environment and the particular strength of psychoanalytic theorisations that have consistently privileged the child.
Q&A
Dr Jean Petrucelli
Body to Body Interactions
How do we view another person’s body when entering a room? When a body meets a body no formal introductions are made. What are the feelings and ideas, conscious and unconscious that go through our minds when we are looking at another person? As therapists, we focus on words but our bodies also speak. An emphasis on clinical interaction, intergenerational transmission of maternal body image, and mutual influence allows us to explore the bodily aspects of communication where the joining of minds and bodies can be both embodied and embodying. Dr Petrucelli will discuss disorders of self and mutual regulation manifesting as eating disorders.
Q&A
Q&A with Lesley Caldwell and Jean Petrucelli
End