How Can We Have a Body?: Desires and Corporeality

This paper proposes a revision of the ways in which the body and bodily symptoms are theorized in psychoanalysis. It argues that psychoanalysis' mentalist stance can fail to sufficiently address the subjective experience of the body as a body and in doing so can miss crucial dimensions of the patient's experience.

Drawing on the countertransferential bodily experience of the analyst during specific therapies enables a fuller understanding of a person's bodily development. The author further proposes that the body is an outcome of relational dynamics that bequeath specific cultural and familial understandings to the contemporary body. She suggests ways in which physical symptoms can be understood as a search on the part of the patient to create a body that is alive for her or him when there is an absence of a sense of body surety.