The doctor, the patient and the body

Michael Balint has helped us realize that the clinical interaction is, above all, an inter-human interaction. However, the lived experience of the body -- the existential anatomy -- occupies but a very small space in the consciousness of medicine. Even the "psychosomatic body" is a theoretical construct favouring observation rather than understanding. The doctor shares the conditions of embodied life with his patients, and, in addition, has the opportunity to refine his sensitivity to the variations of bodily experience in his work with patients. Thus, a bodily empathic basis for clinical interaction is laid on which understanding and diagnosis may reinforce one another in a common endeavour.