Holding and Visceral Attention: Bodily Concentration of an Analyst under COVID-19 Lockdown

This essay emerged from my clinical experience of working psychoanalytically by remote means due to the pandemic of COVID-19. During analytic listening, in the absence of bodily togetherness and in the presence of heightened anxiety about survival, I turned my attention inwardly towards the interior of my own body and made a spontaneous gesture of doodling. These two moves, mental and bodily, both unintentional and unconventional to my analytic training, restored my psychic aliveness and facilitated the process of analytic holding. I will reflect on this particular experience using Milner's concepts: framed gap and the analyst's concentration of the body, which I further conceptualize as 'visceral attention'. I consider it as a corporal counterpart of 'free-floating attention'. It is my contention that the concept of visceral attention has a wider implication for analytic technique in the ordinary psychoanalytic setting when uncertainty prevails in psychoanalytic treatment and with patients whose predicament is marked by body-mind split. The essay explores an analogy between visceral attention and doodling to hold the analytic process at a non-verbal level. The blank paper and blank inside of the body stand for the 'framed gap', the negative space for a new symbol to emerge.