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The animating body: psychoid substance as a mutual experience of psychosomatic disorder
Author(s) -
Clark Giles
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
journal of analytical psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.285
H-Index - 23
eISSN - 1468-5922
pISSN - 0021-8774
DOI - 10.1111/j.1465-5922.1996.00353.x
Subject(s) - projective identification , psychology , countertransference , embodied cognition , psychoanalysis , confusion , object (grammar) , psychotherapist , object relations theory , id, ego and super ego , projective test , dream , psychoanalytic theory , epistemology , philosophy , linguistics
Starting from Jung's hypothesis of ‘the psychoid’, the author suggests that the concept can be extended and understood as a dynamic, relational and interpersonal experience‐especially in regressed analytic relations. The author then defines his use of the term ‘animating body’ as having to do with primitive animal imagery and with psychosomatic symptoms stemming from disturbed pre‐verbal and pre‐whole‐object stages of development. A case of a borderline patient is presented, whose projective identifications into the analyst infected him with her psychosomatic disorder, with her internalized Oedipal confusion and necessarily induced a mutually similar animal dream symbolism. If these embodied countertransference experiences (of desperate merging and sickening identification) can be lived through (tolerated and survived), thought through and interpreted, then they can actually become enlivening and lead to a therapeutic psychosomatic co‐ordination.