Ailing Body: Psychoanalytic Views to Psychosomatics

Library of Psychoanalysis, Psike Istanbul, Conferences 8

İstanbul Bilgi University Publishing

In this book you will follow the discussions about the relationship between body and psyche through the essays presented in the symposium “Ailing Body: Psychosomatic” organised by Istanbul Psychoanalytic Association for Training, Researche and Development (Psike İstanbul).

Working with somatic patients is very demanding and constitutes a difficult challenge for the analyst. What do you do as an analyst with a patient who tells you: “I am not suffering psychically, I am physically ill, that’s all”? The founders of Paris’ psychosomatic school placed great emphasis on the fact that somatic patients had a defect in their mental functioning. I don’t ask myself anymore: “what is lacking in this patient?” but rather: “what is lacking in me to be able to get in touch with him?”.
Jacques Press

Body and Mind do not exist: there is no such thing as a body; there is no such thing as a mind. Still more radically it may be stated that body and mind have no kind of intrinsic existence that may be differentiated from the organism as a whole, but are two categories having to do with the perspective of the observer. If body and mind are “one and identical thing” (Spinoza) we need to attribute to what we observe as body the same qualities we are used to attributing to the mind. We need therefore to envisage a body that:

• thinks, feels, responds, suffers, enjoys

• shows relational movements, to the point of hypothising a bodily transference and a bodily countertransference. 
Luigi Solano

Now that she is talking more poignantly and pointedly about the inhabitants of her body and its pathways I must speak of the body and its inhabitants in terms of ghost, host, and guest. Our co-creation of a language that best serves her mind enables her to puzzle things out more: “My bowels are now moving and so I must move into some other area….Do you think there is anything inside me?
Maurice Apprey

Writers: 
Pınar Limnili, Mine Özmen, Ayla Yazıcı, Berrak Ciğeroğlu, Jacques Press, Bella Habip, Meltem Temiz, Nesli Keskinöz Bilen, Işın Sayın Tamerk, Sibel Mercan, Luigi Solano, Maurice Apprey, Mine Özgüroğlu