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Jan 22, 2018

Geraldine Godsil on Somatic Countertransference


The paper I’ve written on the somatic countertransference took many years to take shape. It was written several years after the analytic work ended but I had carried the notes with me as I retired from clinical practice and relocated. Why we can’t yet understand a patient’s communication is a vital question for clinicians and why we can, eventually, in a kind of Kairos moment, finally ‘get it’ is also interesting.

Category: News
Posted by: Scotch

With the patients I write about here I think there’s a level of pain that has to be evacuated or erased that means that primitive communications from mother to child and child into any container offering itself, are of nuclear violence. This could be misapprehended as a terrorising attack.

The body of the patient and the body of the analyst are seen increasingly as sources of primitive information about the hazards of psychic experience seeking a somapsyche to contain it. Jung’s alchemical metaphor in the Psychology of the Transference suggests a bio-chemical model for the most archaic levels of experience within the relational field of the analytic encounter.

Geraldine Godsil

 

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