Memory traces and sensory perceptions. When dance enters the session

This paper looks at how sensory perception and motility in the session can activate and reshape memory-traces of unconscious infantile sexuality. It investigates how listening to them in the transference serves as an appeal to drive representation, the redeployment of the autoerotism of infantile sexuality and its participation in the production of fantasy, contributing to the accomplishment of infantile wishes. The author explores this hypothesis in the psychoanalytic work of a female patient who practises dance and makes particular use of sensory perceptions and motility in the session. She asks herself which sensory elements have permeated memory, that is to say the original memory traces that can never be retrieved, and how and for what purposes this is expressed in the session through speech or perception. She shows how sensory perception is an ally of language inasmuch as it is capable of qualifying internal processes, but also emphasizes its duplicity, in that it partially and momentarily escapes the long path of inhibition.