Main description:

This book is based on the work done by a group of British and Italian psychoanalysts who have been meeting twice yearly since 2003 to study clinically the relationship between the mind and the body of their patients.

The analytical dyad became the focus of a dialectical movement between body and mind and between subject and object. Containing contributions from a range of distinguished British and Italian analysts, this book covers such key topics as somatic symptoms, the embodied unconscious, bodily expressions of affect, sexuality, violence, self-harm, suicide attempts, hypochondria, hysteria, anorexia and bulimia, and splits and fragmentation associated with the body. The theoretical understanding is inspired by various psychoanalytic theoreticians, including Freud, M. Klein, Winnicott and Bion and their theories on sexuality, infantile sexuality, libido, aggressiveness, death instinct, Oedipus complex and mother-child relationship.

Offering new advances in theoretical thinking and practical applications for clinical work, this book will be essential for all psychoanalysts and mental health clinicians interested in understanding serious mental disturbance that is represented in the body.

Contents:

Introduction

Ronny Jaffe and Donald Campbell

Chapter 1

Traces of the Early Relationship in the Corpus of Freud's Work: A re-reading

Giuseppina Antinucci

Chapter 2

The "Psychoanalytical" Body and its Clinical Implication

Sarantis Thanopulos

Chapter 3

Transmission of Somatic and Sensory States in the Psychoanalytical Relationship

Ronny Jaffe

Chapter 4

Perfume

Maria Colazzo Hendriks

Chapter 5

Access to the Embodied Unconscious through Reverie and Metaphor

Benedetta Guerrini Degl'Innocenti

Chapter 6

The Body in Psychoanalysis

Cristiano Rocchi

Chapter 7

The Body in the Consulting Room: Italian-British conversations

Barbara Piovano

Chapter 8

When the Body Speaks: Bodily expressions of unrepresented affects

Luigi Caparrotta

Chapter 9

A Skin of One's Own: On boundaries, the skin, and feminine sexuality

Patricia Grieve

Chapter 10

"Seized With A Savage Woe": Attacks on the vitality of the body of a suicidal young man

Joan Schachter

Chapter 11

Physical Violence and its Depiction by a Male Adolescent

Donald Campbell

Chapter 12

The Hidden Secret - Ego Distortion in Facial Deformity:

Some reflections on the analysis of an adolescent boy

Bernard Roberts

Afterthoughts

Ronny Jaffe and Donald Campbell