Experience made concrete: the body-mind relationship and possible transformational processes in Group Therapy
Abstract
This paper considers those particular pathologies in which the body is thought of as “a psychic object par excellence”, or rather, as the only psychic object that is the locus where the subject’s unity is recognized. I am referring to patients who are unable, for various reasons, to mentalize and transform perceptive and sensorial experience into emotional meaningfulness, and instead encapsulate it within corporeity. Emotions and affects are experienced as enemies that must be kept at a distance and the subject is held prisoner in a continuous, concrete sense of experiential immediateness. Being in a therapeutic group setting is what this kind of patient needs, since the group is an Read more