In my analytic practice I have encountered the countertransference experience, just once or twice, of being with some body who is utterly blind to my being there.
The paper will consider how interruptions in the integration of psyche with soma can disturb the individual’s ‘vertical axis’ of connection to body and emotional experience. In this situation the ‘horizontal axis’ which offers the capacity to feel empathically related with any body, can also collapse. Alongside development in many other areas, there persists profound loneliness, stress and anxiety that have no possibility of being contained in the security of another’s understanding and concern.
For the patient to work analytically in this situation involves their re-connecting to the states that were dissociated during early development – an encounter with extreme pain and the intolerable emotions that must now be borne within the body for healing and integration to occur. The paper presents a case in which a previously repeating cycle of breakdowns and partial recoveries was finally worked through, allowing the emergence of a sense of an embodied analyst – some body – who had been there all along.