Relational Perspectives on the Body

"In recent years, psychoanalytic investigation has focused so extensively on the intersubjective and interrelational that we could lose sight of the importance of bodily experience and bodily phenomena. In this timely collection, Aron and Anderson have brought together clinicians writing at the leading edge of psychoanalytic scholarship to examine the place of the body within the intersubjective context. All of us have a psychosomatic potential, and in Relational Perspectives on the Body psychoanalysis continues to struggle with the body/mind matrix, the role of the body in self-organization, gender issues and the body, and the meaning of bodily expressions on the psychoanalytic stage. This book will be of immense interest not only to psychoanalysts and other mental health professionals, but to everyone intrigued by the workings of the psychosoma and the body-mind relationship."

- Joyce McDougall, Ed.D., International Psychoanalytic Association

"Occasionally we hear talk of a book in our field that is destined to influence the practice of psychoanalysis as much by its therapeutic 'rightness' as by its conceptual persuasiveness. Aron and Anderson's Relational Perspectives on the Body will be such a book: a masterful blend of essays on mind/body wholeness and its inseparability from the self/other wholeness that links the intersubjective world of patient and analyst in a shared psychosomatic reality. Like a stalking lioness, each astonishingly lithe and muscular chapter leaps at the mind of the reader - especially an unwary reader anticipating a casual intellectual stroll. Scholarly and timely, this volume offers a clinical approach toward working with bodily states of mind in a relational context that, I predict, will inform the thinking of all analysts for years to come."

- Philip M. Bromberg, Ph.D., Author, Standing in the Spaces (Analytic Press, 2001)