In her paper, Koshkarian (2022) argues that bodily autonomy should be placed at the center of the psychoanalytic map as a fundamental human right, urging psychoanalysis to consolidate theories of child development in response to social pressures that makes one (us) believe that freedom, self possession and choice are not the rights of all. Her paper focuses on the many ways in which we silence human bodies as we remove their right of ownership, agency and power. She highlights how this silencing happens as oppressed bodies bear the impact of our social colonization of the mind – in her words “citizens with intersectional, marginalized identities experience exponential diminishment and expropriation of their freedom…” (Koshkarian, 2022, p. 20). She believes that as psychoanalysts we should foster bodily autonomy in our patients as a way into an empowered bodily relationship that will endorse boundaries, informed choices and safe personal space.
As I reflect on body and choice, I also consider the analytic work in the context of re-creating a body that may choose to bear a baby, and therefore, give birth to a mother. As Winnicott reminds us, there is no baby without a mother.
In considering the loss of reproductive rights for women, I am compelled to reflect on the control of women’s bodies solidified intensely by a patriarchal belief system that delimits the possibilities of a bodily anchored experience of motherhood and threatens the development and evolution of an emotionally healthy mother-child bond. Reproductive rights are at the core of the possibility of a woman becoming a mother, fully owning her body and offering it as a hospitable nest for a baby to grow.
In this context, analysis as a place for a free body to be expanding on its own sensorial experience requires an analyst who is fully open and committed to the radical embodiment of a rupture with a mind that is colonized by systems of oppression. It requires an analyst who embraces choice at its core, including holding the theory as the beginning point and never the finish line.
Going back to Koshkarian, she also considers that ethos of power and domination got inflicted into our ‘collective psyche-soma fabric’, leading to our relationship with our bodies being coerced by the social framework. Lemma (2009) reflects that, beyond its physical reality, our bodies are marked by our relationship with others, which I consider to be the first space of figuration and representation of the mind. The body then, is by definition, a social construct, a social space, a social experience, invested and defined by our collective/symbolic representations and expectations. Alterity is at the core of our becoming, and the most definite imprint of our bodies.
In that, I agree with Koshkarian that at the center of our job, we need to examine and move beyond continuing to silence bodies and minds, in order to move towards an embodied practice that considers the social, and the individual, hoping to free ourselves from unconscious systems of oppression. Freedom is then, like Voung (2019) beautifully defines, “the space between the prey and its predator” (p. 4), a precarious space in which thinking may emerge. This is a necessary undertaking if we don’t want to maintain a psychoanalytic practice that consolidates even further our patients’ marginalized and compliant social and emotional position.
References:
Koshkarian, L. (2023). Placing Bodily Autonomy on the Psychoanalytic Map, Critica, Fall 2022, Vol 4.
Lemma, A. (2009). Being seen or being watched? A psychoanalytic perspective on body dysmorphia. Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 90:753-771
Voung, O. (2019). On Earth we’re briefly gorgeous. New York: Penguin Press.
