Select Page

The Body and its Envelopes

by | Vol 27 (3/4) 2009

This article explains how packing as a cure affects the subject and her body in a special therapeutic way. The encounter with a young psychotic woman and her suffering, written all over her body, led us to initiate this treatment which takes the body as a privileged route of access for therapy. Packing as a cure is an attempt to create a corporeal development with the aim of reconstructing a psychic envelope and as such providing access to a history that is singular. We will demonstrate how this cure is a process of permanent dialogue with the collective. Using clinical material we will illustrate how the platform of packing and theatre gives this woman the opportunity to become the author of her own personal story.

Related articles

  • The body and the complaint in consultation: some preliminary remarks

    This article addresses the problematic status of the body and how the entangled somatic and psychological causalities can be conceptualized on the basis of daily practice.

  • “Morphogenesis” of the body: marked by the signifier?

    Starting from a number of remarks and hypotheses of authors such as Georg Groddeck, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jean Guir and Colette Soler about the entanglement of psyche and body, which, amongst other things, manifests itself in the activation of latent genes under the influence of specific signifiers, the author explores the influence of the signifier on the development of the shape of the body. Her analytical practice led her to hypothesize that some aspects of the body – mainly…

  • B minor

    B minor sketches in manner that is filmic and poetic the pathic landscape of a corridor, the psychiatric unit of a general hospital. The evocation introduces us to a concept of "space". The geographical or architectural geometric space is ontic. Her sense is pathic. The pathic landscape is directly and immediate revealed to us as "mood". The rhythm is distinguished from the cadence. It opens the space and the time of waiting. The rhythm is personal; it is the "how"…