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Discussion Forum |
| JOURNAL OF JUNGIAN THEORY AND PRACTICE |
Vol. 10 No. 1 2008
"The Body in Jung's Work Basic Elements to Lay the Foundation for a Theory of Technique" by André Sassenfeld |
| Comment |
Submitter |
Date Posted |
THE MIND-BODY RELATIONSHIP IN THE THERAPEUTIC PROCESS
I wish to address the question: “Can the body think?” and “How is this problem related to the therapeutic process?” In this context, the term “body” means the parts of the body outside the brain and is used below in this sense. The conscious functioning of the brain controls parts of the body; and its unconscious functioning by the right brain is shown to be capable of controlling the whole of the body, except that it cannot produce fine and sequential movements. In the opposite direction, the body influences conscious thinking by conveying messages to the brain. The simplest and best known cases of this are the messages sent to the brain about the environment and about the state of the parts of the body, as happens in perception and the sensations associated with parts of the body. There are also the somatic symptoms of primary mental disorders which are by definition not caused by organic (bodily) defects or dysfunctions. All symptoms of mental disorders are defined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) as harmful manifestations of dysfunctions, and this is the generally accepted view at the present time.
However, according to Jung, the unconscious compensates the lopsidedness in the conscious attitude, meaning that the unconscious corrects the harmful mistakes in the conscious attitude. Jung used this rule mostly in dream interpretation but occasionally used it also in symptom interpretation, as in the case of his patient Bebe, for example. There are also symptoms that, besides being a manifestation of a dysfunction, or of a lopsidedness in the conscious attitude, have obvious self-protective functions. For example, anxiety is a “danger signal” which prepares the person to perceive and cope with dangers about which there is no sufficient information, whereas fear does the same thing in relation to sufficiently known dangers, as Freud discovered in his old age through linguistic analysis. Another example is ordinary pain, which warns consciousness about harm suffered by a part of the body and even does more than that: A crack in a leg bone causes pain, pain prevents the movements of the leg, and this facilitates the automatic mending of the crack in the bone. There are also pain symptoms that are not caused by bodily harms and are considered to be caused mentally. According to Jung’s compensation theory applied to symptoms, and as suggested by the symptoms that have obvious self-protective functions, the pain symptoms that are caused mentally have self-protective functions and discharge this function by conveying messages to consciousness like the symptoms with obvious self-protective functions do.
One way in which the body can be involved, or can be used, in the therapeutic process is exposed in the preceding paragraph: Somatic symptoms can be interpreted in accordance with the compensation theory, for example as message carriers, and effective means of therapy can be devised by profiting from the those messages. Another way in which the body is involved in the therapeutic process is this: The unconscious of the patient tries to convey messages to the therapist using body language. The unconscious does this also by making consciousness talk about the problem, or lopsidedness, that necessitated the self-protective, or compensatory, symptoms, bypassing conscious awareness, because consciousness is usually unaware, due to repression, that the disorder consists of a lopsidedness in the conscious attitude and its compensation by the unconscious. All these mean that, during the therapeutic session, the therapist has to try to understand the messages that the patient’s unconscious is trying to convey to the therapist through body language and by talking about some events casually as well as intently. The production of symptoms during the therapeutic session is one more means by which the unconscious tries to convey messages to the therapist. Luborsky argues that the therapist can profit from such symptoms in clarifying the etiology of a disorder and calls this method “the symptom-context method.” But he is unsuccessful in diagnosis and therapy because he does not use the compensation theory.
Now we can answer the crucial question: Can the body think? “So one can say it is always a wise thing when you discover a new metaphysical truth, or find an answer to a metaphysical
problem, to try it out for a month or so, whether it upsets your stomach or not; if it does, you can always be sure it is wrong. [A] good metaphysical idea does not spoil one’s stomach” (Jung, cited by Sassenfeld, p. 6). Spoiling one’s stomach has to be interpreted on the basis of the compensation theory like any other somatic symptom has to be, that is, as carrying a message issued by the unconscious mind and addressed to consciousness, meaning, "Your clever idea is disgusting!" There is absolutely no reason and no need for assuming that the unconscious mind includes the body as a whole, whereas there are enough research results that show that the unconscious is the right brain in this context. This means that there is no reason for assuming that the body outside the brain can think.
I would like to use this occasion to point out that obscure ideas are often produced in relation to Jungian thinking, assuming that they point to some yet unknown truths. In reality, obscure ideas are usually caused by and are manifestations of insufficient understanding and misinterpretation of some phenomena. What is most needed now is the complete and correct extension of the compensation theory, which is presently used only in relation to dreams and often incorrectly, to the symptoms of primary mental disorders. The current understanding of symptoms as only harmful manifestations of dysfunctions, as expressed in the DSM, puts research and therapy on wrong tracks and makes a large part of humanity continue to suffer from disorders that can be terminated by using the compensation theory. This is a terrible scandal that Jungians can and have to terminate before everything else, and certainly before putting forth clever-looking ideas.
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Altan Loker |
12-Nov-08 |
| While it is welcome news that there is now an effort being made to recover the pragmatist possibilities of our non-conceptual habitual lives found in Jung's complex psychology it would be unfortunate if these investigations restricted themselves to the reductive interpretations of Ego psychology and left unexplored the more poetic possibilities raised by analysts like Julia Kristeva, Isabelle Stengers,Catherine Malabou, and the whole post Merleau-Ponty/Wittgenstein field of the phenomenological psychology of expressive/chiasmatic embodiment. |
Dirk Felleman |
03-Dec-08 |
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