Written by Riccardo Lombardi, MD (Roma), Translated by Luisa Marino and Patricia Marra
While working with hysteric patients, Freud (1895) soon realized that the physical/bodily attack is always associated to some kind of hallucinatory trace. This way he discovered an association between the body and the mind. Freud identifies a split within consciousness so that “normal consciousness” is alternated with the bodily conscious phenomena and he called those hypnoid states. The so called “common representations” have the disadvantages of not being directly connected to the body where emotions originate from. The bodily sensation becomes the compass to guide psychological working through. And the pressure exercised by the bodily impulses requires a specific attention so that psychological representations do not withdraw too much away from the sensorial perception.
These initial discoveries by Freud seem to be particularly relevant nowadays in relation to how much the body has become crucial in contemporary psychoanalysis. Let’s explore then briefly how focusing on the body has been a constant all through Freud’s theorisation. In Dreams (1900), the ”Wunsch” has a space and a meaning that is totally physical. Starting from this physical core of the dream, dream work translates the primitive world of physical impulses: such work should be considered not only for its defensive value in regard of dream censorship, but mainly as a primary psychological way of organizing the not yet formed bodily dimension.
The bodily implications considered in Tre Saggi sulla sessualità (1905) are clear. The relevance of body conditioning on psychological life, for Freud, is expressed essentially via sexuality. In my opinion, nowadays, sexuality should be rather considered only as a “model” of a body-mind relation that has wider implications and has to do mainly with the evolution of body-affects-thoughts (Lombardi, 2009).
When Freud, in Schreber, says that the subject considers its own body as “love object” (1911a), he is closer to affirming that the libidinal investment of the body could be considered a “structural” aspect of the person: something very relevant in contemporary clinical work. Of particular relevance is Freud’s famous essay (1911b), in which, alongside his emphasis on the reality principle, comes his introduction of his theory of thinking as a containment of muscular discharge, and his theory of the birth of the mind as setting into motion the sense organs of the body: Bion (1962) will then start from these hypotheses, one who notoriously hinges his own thinking on very few central psychoanalytic hypotheses.
When Freud introduces the concept of the drives (1915) as an expression of the body’s “need for work,” it places the psyche in connection with the body; the reference to “work” connotes the relationship of necessity that links the body and the mind. If that “work” is not realized, a dangerous fracture is established, namely a body-mind dissociation (Lombardi, 2016).
In his essay on “The Unconscious” (1915), Freud introduces the necessity of a connection between the “thing-representation” and the “word-representation,” warning that when we think in abstract terms, our thinking becomes a “philosophizing” similar to the delusions of the schizophrenic. Here, Freud emphasizes the concreteness from which the mind originates and refers to the body as an indispensable element that limits thinking.
In his letter to Groddeck on June 5, 1917, Freud affirms that the unconscious is the missing link between the body and the psyche: if we lose the bond with the body, we also lose contact with the unconscious.
Later, in 1923, Freud places the roots of the id in bodily functioning, emphasizing how the ego is structured at the frontier of the id. At the same time, he emphasizes the contribution of the body to the functions of the ego, where the ego is “first of all a body ego” (1923).
In his reformulation of anxiety, Freud (1925) emphasizes that anxiety is an expression of internal needs, and, therefore, a communication bridge between the body and the mind. Freud (1925) in his reformulation of anxiety stressed that anxiety is the testimony of internal desires, and thus is a bridge for the communication of the body to the mind. In Freud (1930) he emphasizes that the function of the body is to define a sense of reality and a differentiation between the internal and external, indicating how the experience of the body is central to the forces of the undeferretiated. The presence of the body is seen by Freud as a source of differentiation. It is the real nature and it is concrete. It has not for the implication of an unconscious fantasy, as was defined later on by Klein. Freud speaks about the body always in a concrete manner when he identified the fragility of the body as one of three principal forces of our human suffering. The real body is a continuous area for the development of the reality principle.
Freud (1938) “The Outline of Psychoanalysis” stated the important aspect of the body, considering the somatic process as real. In this formulation, Freud opened a more radical focus on the body and on the relation of the body/mind placing it at the center of psychoanalytic conceptualization.
This brief note shows Freud’s work on the body. We need psychoanalysis not as a method or a system of fragmented theories that become a religious dogma, but we need a few hypotheses. We must understand how the man-animal transforms his body in a thinking process.
At the same time, we can say that Freud in reality is stuck in a method that stresses the continuity of the body and mind. The contemporary clinic is demonstrating quite the opposite. We are encountering a body that is absent, or completely disassociated from the mind, take as an example the problem of the anorexic and other pathologies of eating disorders. We can also add bodies that are constructed artificially, or the body that functions on abstract intellectualism, etc. In these cases, the disassociation must address the symptom in his specificity. Other authors, contemporaries of Freud like Victor Tausk and William Reich, intuited more than Freud the role of dissociation – body – mind. Unfortunately, the work of these authors remained isolated from the official psychoanalytic practice.
