With contributions from Antonello Correale, Giuseppe Craparo, Vincenzo David, Alessandra Lemma, Clara Mucci, Georg Northoff, Andrea Scalabrini, and Allan N. Schore.
Before words exist, it is gestures, gazes, and bodily resonances that give rise to a sense of self. From these first encounters emerges a web of memory and meaning that accompanies psychic life, often beyond the reach of conscious awareness. When such bonds are interrupted or traumatised, suffering no longer finds expression through language but becomes embodied – in the body itself, in symptoms, in silence. To understand and to heal these states means learning to listen to the living matter of experience, to the pre-verbal forms through which the mind communicates.
In the therapeutic field, this approach calls for a new way of being in relation. The analytic word gives way to the listening of rhythm, breath, and the emotional movement that flows between patient and analyst. The body becomes not only an object of inquiry, but also an instrument of encounter and transformation. The image that emerges is that of an embodied psyche, one that is always born in relation: there is no mind without the body, nor self without another with whom to resonate. To rediscover this truth is to restore to psychoanalysis and to the unconscious its most vital and original dimension – that of a science of the human, rooted in the living experience of bodies, emotions, sexuality, and shared presence.
Clara Mucci, PhD, is professor of psychodynamic psychology at the University of Bergamo, Italy, where she is also Director of the School of Specialization in Health Psychology. She had served as professor of English Studies (Shakespeare) until 2012. She is a licensed psychoanalyst and practices in Milan, Italy. She holds PhDs in both English Literature (Genova, 1994) and in Literature, Anthropology and Psychoanalysis (ILA, Emory University, USA, 1999) besides a PsyD in Clinical Psychology (Chieti, 2004; Milan, SIPP, 2011). She is the author of five books on Shakespeare and literary theory and in the field of psychoanalysis her major publications are: Beyond Individual and Collective Trauma (Routledge, 2013); Borderline Bodies (Norton, 2018); and Resilience and Survival (Karnac, 2022). With Giuseppe Craparo, she edited Unrepressed Unconscious, Implicit Memory and Clinical Work (Karnac, 2017). She co-edited, with Arnold Rachman, Ferenczi’s Confusion of Tongues Theory of Trauma (Routledge, 2023). She lectures extensively and gives supervision in several countries to different training institutes and mental health clinics.
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