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When the Body Speaks: A British-Italian Dialogue

Editor : Donald Campbell, Editor : Ronny Jaffe

Reviews and Endorsements

"This wonderful book explores to depth the unending unconscious effort of human beings trying to recover unity and harmony in their own sense of self. It investigates how to repair the split and lacks which detached minds from bodies, creating tragic feelings of subjective discontinuity and alienation.

An innovative experiment of scientific cross-fertilization, by merging creatively for 14 years two different analytic perspectives thanks to the joint theoretical-clinical research of a "resilient" British-Italian working group, generates here a fascinating, unexpected and much more integrated vision on the soma-psyche issue.

This book confirms the immense power of cross-fertilization in psychoanalysis, and I entusiastically recommend it to the readers." - Stefano Bolognini, Past-President of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

"When the Body Speaks is based on a series of dialogues held along 14 years between analysts from the British Psychoanalytical Society and the Italian Psychoanalytical Society. This highly interesting book shows how building bridges between different psychoanalytical Societies and perspectives can produce new interesting ideas on the complex issue of the body-mind relationship. Issues such as the role of the senses in psychic life, the body as 'a way of being, ' the maternal body and its availability to the infant, the role of metaphor in connection to the body and the place of the analyst's body in analytic treatment are just some of the subjects touched upon in this book which together with detailed description of clinical material of the analysis of children, adolescents and adults, make When the Body Speaks intellectually stimulating as well as extremely helpful for anyone interested in psychoanalysis and in clinical practice in general." - Prof Catalina Bronstein, Fellow and Training Analyst, British Psychoanalytical Society and Visiting Professor, Psychoanalysis Unit, University College London.


"Edited by Don Campbell and Ronny Jaffe this fascinating and lively book deals with sensoriality and bodily issues into the analytic material, it aims to a deeper understanding of the human somatopsychic unity. "When the body speaks" is the result of years of dialogues between Italian and British psychoanalysts who met from 2001 to 2013. A specific aspect of the topic is tackled in each chapter.

Distinguished authors present clinical cases that illustrate their way of being in touch with their own body-mind unit when working, thinking, and interpreting to the patient. Affected and concretely transformed by a psychosomatic disease the body can also be invasive in the clinical material and this can distort the countertransference. Faced with the patient's body on the couch the analyst needs to listen to his own bodily counter-transferential reactions and try to work through his blind spots or scars. Remarkable survey!!" - Marilia Aisenstein, Training Analyst with the Hellenic Psychoanalytic Society and the Paris Psychoanalytic Society, past President of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society and of the Paris Psychosomatic Institute.