Re-minding the body

The author discusses a fragment of the analysis of a patient who had experienced both neglect and sexual molestation during early childhood. The analysand had developed a defensively hypertrophied form of mindedness in an effort to gain some sense of control over bodily experience, which threatened not only his sanity, but his very sense of being. The focus of the paper is on a series of sessions from a period of regression during which the patient experienced psychotic-level anxiety and a feeling of impending psychic disintegration. The author discusses in detail two interventions that he made during this period of analytic work. The first involved the analyst's finding himself speaking with a parental voice with which he took on the responsibility of protectively "minding" the patient while the patient experienced himself on the edge of disintegration. The second spontaneous intervention involved the analyst's inviting the patient to imagine himself at his present age into a story of molestation (based on the patient's history and the history of the analysis) in which the analyst was a third presence bearing witness, bearing language and bearing compassion. These interventions seemed to have been of importance in facilitating the patient's development of a greater sense of being alive in a co-extensive minded body and bodied mind.