This presentation aims to account for the possibility the body offers as a via regia to aspects of the self that never access a representational level due to a collective trauma lived at an early age. It offers an introduction to some of the psychic consequences and clinical difficulties that may emerge when the early personal wound is deeply merged with a family and collective trauma. I will particularly focus on The Enforced Disappearance of people occurred during Argentina’s State Terrorism which has lived hundreds of children stripped of their roots and true identity. When, as in these cases, the process of translation and integration from implicit to explicit autobiographical memory becomes interrupted, there is a need in the clinical work for new approaches that may facilitate the access to this preverbal-somatic-affective narrative.
In this lecture, I would like to reflect on how, by including a non-verbal symbolic approach such as Embodied Active Imagination – also known as Authentic Movement – sensations experienced by the living body of the patient can function as nodal centres of implicit memories that under certain conditions can release and give rise to long-buried impressions. The patient’s body gestures, and physical sensations act as a point of departure, which bridges the preverbal-implicit knowledge with the emergent emotions and images, contributing to create a symbolic narrative that, heretofore, has been brutally taken away.
Karin Fleischer, Argentina, is a clinical psychologist, Jungian analyst, and founder member of the Uruguayan-Argentinian Society for Analytical Psychology (SUAPA) and is on the executive board (2018-2021 / 2021-2024) of CLAPA – Latin American Committee for Analytical Psychology. She has introduced Authentic Movement/ Embodied Active Imagination, in Argentina and in several Latin American countries, teaching seminars on the Body and Active Imagination, nationally and internationally, during the past twenty-five years. She writes on topics about trauma, dissociation, and the inclusion of the body in clinical work. Her latest articles have been published in the Journal of Analytical Psychology (2020, 2022, 2023).
