Re-minding the body

The author discusses a fragment of the analysis of a patient who had experi enced both neglect and sexual molestation during early childhood. The analy sand had developed a defensively hypertrophied from of mindedness in an eff ort to gain some sense of control over bodily experience, which threatened not only his sanity, but his very sense of being. The focus of the paper is on a series of sessions from a period of regression during which the patie nt experienced psychotic-level anxiety and a feeling of impending psychic d isintegration. The author discusses in detail two interventions that he mad e during this period of analytic work. The first involved the analyst's fin ding himself speaking with a parental voice with which he took on the respo nsibility of protectively "minding" the patient while the patient experienc ed himself on the edge of disintegration. The second spontaneous interventi on involved the analyst's inviting the patient to imagine himself at his pr esent age into a story of molestation (based on the patient's history and t he history of the analysis) in which the analyst was a third presence beari ng witness, bearing language and bearing compassion. These interventions se emed to have been of importance in facilitating the patient's development o f a greater sense of being alive in a co-extensive minded body and bodied m ind.