Falling, primitive separation and encapsulated body engrams - working through a bodily encoded unconscious syndrome.

Besides the symbolic unconscious, psychoanalysis today investigates unconscious structures that are dissociated from mental functioning (Lombardi 2017) and encoded in bodily inscriptions. These bodily configurations often stay outside of the psychoanalytical attention and technique of treatment. Two concepts - encapsulated body engrams and somatic narration - provide a theoretical and technical proposition for the bodily encoded unconscious. Within this frame, the paper focuses on new aspects. It is outlined that the encapsulated body engrams result from a traumatic disorganization of the primal relation to the caregiver leading to an impossibility of a separation from the mother's body. Separation is now feared as a deadly fall into an endless abyss. However, this element is no longer viewed as an unconscious phantasy that can be interpreted but as the perception of a disorganized bodily syndrome that must be worked through with a considerable reverberation-time (Birksted-Breen 2009) in a body-to-body dialogue. Somatic narration encourages the patient to describe his painful bodily perception and invites the body-self to show up during the analytical encounter. Working this way allows the patients disorganized body-self to slowly develop into a container to harbor, organize and symbolize emotions. Four clinical examples illustrate this manner of working.

Petrification and Revitalization: The Role of Somatic Narration in Working Through A War Trauma.

The author investigates bodily aspects of the defense organization in the treatment of a soldier suffering from a war traumatization. The patient reports two situations-a bomb attack and the subsequent confrontation with wounded comrades-that had a traumatizing impact. In the treatment process, a phase of stagnation is described before the shared attention is focused on the bodily perception of the patient. His petrified body feeling ("my body feels like concrete") was systematically examined in the therapeutic process then slowly transformed through shared perception, leading to a process of vitalizing reorganization. This method is called somatic narration. It reverses the defense processes of the encapsulated body engram. This capsule results from the threatening impact of a traumatic event, disorganizing the patient's body-self. This disorganization then is encapsulated through a process of petrification and avoidance of awareness. The therapeutic process is described in detail. The structure of the bodily unconscious is revealed. The process of reorganization of perception and memory is outlined.

Unrepresented States and the Bodily Encoded Unconscious.

Unrepresented states are considered important obstacles to the psychoanalytic process. They describe elements that are beyond the reach of the symbolic network with which psychoanalysis is used to working. The emergence of unrepresented states has often been described as the failure of the caregiver to symbolize the child's emotions and thereby enable the child to connect his or her bodily states to the psychic representation. Psychoanalysis, however, has been reluctant to name the locus of these inscriptions beyond the symbolic network as the body-self. The author proposes to do so and discusses two concepts for describing the dynamics of the bodily unconscious and the therapeutic method for calibrating our technique to unrepresented states. The concept of the encapsulated body engram is used to describe the dynamic structure of the bodily unconscious. Processes of disorganization, petrification, perceptual defense, and secondary self-stimulation form the dynamics of the bodily unconscious. The method of somatic narration systematically examines body sensations of the analysand, reverses the defense processes of the engram, and leads to a reorganization of the body self, which can now find connection to symbolic structures again. This requires a more active analytic stance that responds to the defensive processes with which the subject fends off the threat of annihilation he or she was exposed to in the traumatic engram. A clinical vignette illustrates the mode of operation.

Encapsulated body engrams and somatic narration - Integrating body memory into psychoanalytic technique.

Beginning with the observation that a good integration of soma and psyche is often missing in our work with severely disturbed analysands, two concepts are discussed that focus constellations of bodily encoded unconscious material, which needs a specific form of working-through. The concept of encapsulated body engrams referring to defence structures revolving around the inhibition or disorganization of an affective bodily impulse is outlined. The imbalance arising this way is perceived as a foreign body within the body-self. These engrams are repetitive and are not susceptible to symbolic transformation. Parallels between the encapsulated body engram, the autistic objects (Tustin, F. 1980. "Autistic Objects." International Review of Psycho-Analysis 27: 27-39) and Freud's theory of inhibition (Freud, S. 1926. "Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety." SE 20: 77-175) are discussed. To unblock encapsulated engrams, body feelings emerging in the chain of associations are understood as attempts to communicate. In a process called somatic narration these perceptions are contextualized with other bodily sensations. The working-through of this material in transference and countertransference is described in the light of Lombardi's concepts (Lombardi, R. 2017. Body- Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis - Development after Bion. New York: Routledge). Two case reports precede the theoretical discussion.

'For Beauty is nothing but the barely endurable onset of Terror': Outline of a general psychoanalytic aesthetics.

Even close to 80 years after Freud's words that psychoanalysis "has scarcely anything to say about beauty" (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, SE 21, p. 82) the question of a specific psychoanalytic aesthetic is still faced with a deficit in theory. Since aesthetics is related to Aisthesis, the Greek word for 'perception', a psychoanalytic aesthetic can solely emerge from a psychoanalysis of perceptive structures. The term 'kinaesthetic semantic' is introduced in order to exemplify via music how perceptive experiences must be structured for them to be experienced as beautiful. The basic mechanisms - repetition of form (rhythm, unification) and seduction (deviation, surprise) - are defined. With the help of these mechanisms an intensive contact between perceiving object and kinetic subject, the physical self, is established. The intensive relatedness is a requirement for the creative process in art and also for psychic growth on the subject's level. The described basic mechanisms of the aesthetic process in music can also be encountered in painting and poetry. By the means of a self-portrait by Bacon it will be examined how, in art, terror and traumatization are represented via targeted disorganization of beauty endowing mechanisms, hence finding an enabling form of confrontation and integration of fended contents.