Jung Forum: Is any body there?

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.

About the speaker

Susanna Wright is a former co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Analytical Psychology (JAP). She works in full time private practice as an analyst and supervisor both online and in person, and is a Supervising and Training Analyst for the SAP and BJAA. She teaches, lectures and supervises in the UK and internationally, and is a member of the Executive Committee of the IAAP (International Association of Analytical Psychology). She has an MA in the psychodynamics of organisations, has worked in organisational consultancy and was for some years an analyst of routers for IAAP in St Petersburg. She has published several articles in the JAP, and in 2020 won the Michael Fordham prize for a clinical paper. [email protected]

*If you are a psychotherapist or counsellor residing in an active conflict zone, you are eligible to attend this event free of charge (regardless of whether you are a bpf member or not). Please email events@bpf-psychotherapy to enquire about a ticket.