I. The Body in Psychoanalysis

abstract

The author offers a brief introduction to the theories of Armando Ferrari, highlighting his emphasis on the body, not only as mind's first object, but on the object out of which mind originates. He notes that this notion is the heir to Freud's preoccupation with finding the organic foundation of the mind in the body in which it is rooted, and in the idea of the drives as the expression of emergent psychic functions from the body, whereas instinct is the psychical representative of the stimulus originating from within the organism. Drives are not so much corporeal or psychic as defining the connection between the two realms. He suggests that this distinction became blurred with the tendentious translation of Trieb as ‘instinct’ and, later, as ‘emotion’, with the connotations of mental phenomena detached from the physical; while furthermore, the object relational stance, particularly as promulgated by Klein, suggested that such instincts could only be related to by the infant and become mind having been projected into the breast and then reintrojected. The infant's relationship with his body is thus mediated by the breast in Klein's model, rather than immediate and direct. Thus, whereas Freud always linked the psychosexual development of the infant directly with the emergence of physical desire arising from the erogenous zones, Klein linked the first fantasies (innate unconscious phantasy) with the infant's relationship with the maternal breast which now becomes the infant's first object, and emphasis is placed upon this object rather than on the subject of perception. Therapeutically, this necessitates that it also be placed on the transference. Bion moved away from this model with his emphasis on the proto-mental in which physical and mental remain undifferentiated, so that distress from it as a source can be expressed in either; and in his idea of beta elements (sensational and affective) which are chronologically anterior to alpha elements and which can be employed for expression where alpha elements do not exist. The author concludes with a section on Ferrari whose bipartite model of mind arising out of body (as opposed to Winnicott's tripartite model which he discusses earlier in the paper) might be expressed in Bion's terms as one in which beta elements contain within themselves thecapacity to become alpha elements, while alpha function arise out of beta. Bion's shift from the object relations model to one based on the relation between sensation and affect on the one hand and mental function on the other entailed a shift away from insistent transference interpretation in favour of confronting the patient with his bodily self, a shift which Ferrari embraced and developed.