Psychoanalytic Study of the Body-Mind Relationship

The body is the starting point of human experience and the true source of psychic life. However, in recent years psychoanalysis also has to deal with advances in the field of neuroscience, that fact presents the topic of the relationship between the body and the psyche becomes as an extremely relevant and important not only in a theoretical field but also in a practical sense - for analytic work with patients who have extreme disharmony in physical and mental functioning which expressed in the form of their mutual detachment, as if they belong to different people. The purpose of the this work is to conduct a theoretical analysis of the various views in the psychoanalytic tradition about relationship between the body and the psyche and to study the experience of practical application of the concept of the body as a concrete original object. Research objectives: 1) To study the psychoanalytic tradition in retrospect for the relationship and interdependence of physical and mental functioning; 2) To study psychoanalytic approaches to understanding the primary object; 3) Determine the specific significance of the psyche in the formation of the body or in solving problems related to the physiological changes of the subject, and vice versa-the significance of bodily perceptions for the formation of mental space; 4) To study the working experience with patients who demonstrate dissociation of physical and mental functioning on the example of cases. In working with hard-to-reach patients, body integration is a key task, for which analytical relationships focus on the current situation to allow for a disclosure from which differences essential to mental life can be deduced - such as the differences between the body, the psyche and thinking, action and perception, life and death, sleep and waking, sleep and reality. There is a process in which essential correspondences can be established between the bodily sensations, on the one hand, and the mental apparatus, on the other. Analytical work should contribute to the activation of the ability to self-observation, since patients are often mostly just “complicit” in their lives in the absence of contact between the body and the psyche.