Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis

Riccardo Lombardi is a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and MD. He has a full-time private practice in Rome and teaches at the Roman Psychoanalytic Institute of the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA). He is a Training and Supervising Analyst of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society. Among his published works is the book Formless Infinity. Clinical Exploration of Matte Blanco and Bion, published by Routledge in 2015.

• Foreword Introduction 1. Body-Mind Dissociation and Transference onto the Body 2. Visual Power, Emotions and Mental Growth : A clinical essay on some of Bion’s earliest psychosomatic intuitions 3. Intersubjectivity and the Body 4. Primitive Mental States and the Body. A personal view of AB Ferrari’s Concrete Original Object 5. The Body in the Analytic Session: Focusing on the Body-Mind Link 6. Body and Mind in Adolescence 7. Working with the Body-Mind Dissociation in Three Psychoanalytic Sessions 8. The Body, Feelings and the Unheard Music of the Senses 9. The Hat on top of the Volcano: Bion’s O and Ferrari’s Body-Mind Relationship 10. Bodily Claustrophobia and the Music: A Psychoanalytic Note on Beethoven’s Fidelio 11. Conclusion: Art, Experience and Harmonization of the Body-Mind Relationship

‘What seems to us unique is Riccardo Lombardi’s use of his own body, of embodied experiences in the analysand and in the entanglement of both analyst and analysand bodies in fantasies shared and unshared. His approach is designed to teach us confidence in our creative listening, caution in what we imagine we know, and compassionate identification with patient’s suffering and our own. Lombardi strikes us as an analyst determined on the deepest possible encounter with the analysand’s subjectivity at unconscious, somatic, barely figurable levels. At the same time, he is always mindful of the interdependence of consciousnesses across persons inside the consulting room and in the wider world of families and groups.’ - Adrienne Harris and Lewis Aron, Editors of the Relational Perspectives Book Series‘Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis is an immensely useful handbook for the practicing clinician, a guide to recognition of the crucial role of mind-body dissociation in various forms of psychopathology, as well as a compendium of helpful suggestions concerning the techniques by which mind-body dissociation can be addressed and repaired.’ - Owen Renik, Former Editor of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly and author of Practical Psychoanalysis for Therapists and Patients.‘Body-Mind Dissociation in Psychoanalysis is a most original contribution to the psychoanalytic literature: the reader is asked to adopt a new orientation, as if someone had suddenly changed all the subway lines and their stops. This book is extremely rich in clinical presentations, in which the analyst’s interventions always surprise his patients, not to mention his readers. Like those very few authors who are able to turn our psychoanalytic knowledge upside down - as is the case with James Grotstein and Thomas Ogden - Riccardo Lombardi compels the reader to make a quantum leap. He opens the door to what has up to now been unthinkable, exploring the proto-sensorial levels of the analytic relationship in a unique way.’ - Antonino Ferro, President of the Italian Psychoanalytic Society and Consultant Associate Editor of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis.