Habitually, we tend to assume our bodies end at our skin. But all one has to do is drive a car or have your baby sleeping in the next room to realize that’s not quite the case. Intense experiences such as being in love or of acute loss also cue us to the real extent of our so-called ‘physical’ parameters. Throughout our boundaries’ ebb and flow, our somatic selves are in continuous exchange with our environment and interpersonal surroundings – far beyond what we may allow ourselves to realize. The intelligence of our bodies is not designed simply for somatic intra-communication but also, and beyond our obvious organs of perception, for instant assessment and response to our present environment and circumstance.

It may be more accurate to think of our bodies as multi level transmitters and receivers alive in an excited field of mutual message exchange. The ‘transmitters’ exist only as a function of the exchange. If this were not the case, our experiences with each other such as transference-countertransference and projective identification would neither be possible nor make sense.

Freud’s insight into the reality of the unconscious was not simply a discovery of a phenomenon within each of us. It was for him the discovery of a reality as the basis of deeper communication between us. It was the foundation upon which he set the healing power of psychoanalytic communication. The psychoanalytic method of healing was grounded in allowing the unconscious of both client and therapist to be in live communication with each other. It was a healing, not simply of the mind or psyche, but of whole persons in an experience of mutual discovery of unforeseen realities within and between them.

The ‘goal’ of therapies, based upon this insight, is the actual realization of this process between us; a process that is literally a mutual creating through our imagining new possibilities within and between us.

The source and reach of this process is our innate capacity to imagine together – a capacity sustained in the very cells of our bodies. We evolve through our innate capacity to dream of possibilities together.

To the degree to which we allow openness to our feelings between us, to that degree we mutually discover healing realities yet to be imagined.

***

It is by reason of the body, with its miracle of order,

treasures of the past meetings

are poured

into the living occasion.

The final percipient route of occasions

is perhaps

some thread of happenings

wandering

in ’empty’ space amid the interstices of the brain.

It toils not, neither does it spin.

It receives from the past; it lives in the present.

It is shaken by its intensities of private feeling,

adversion or aversion.

In its turn,

this culmination of bodily life

transmits itself

as an element of novelty

throughout the avenues of the body.

Its sole use to the body is its

vivid originality:

it is the organ of novelty.

After Alfred North Whitehead

Process and Reality

Part V

Final Interpretation.

The Ideal Opposites.

©  2015 James Donnelly, DSW.LCSW

All rights reserved

South Garden Press, New York

For thoughts and comments, please e mail to: jdonnellydsw@gmail.com