The Body-Mind Problem in Psychoanalytic Treatment Technique

In recent times, many important publications have emerged that deal with the importance of implicit communication in the therapeutic relationship [1-3]. They assume that success or failure is largely due to the handling of this event. The Saarbrücken research group has shown empirically that this is a valid assumption [4]. Since communication always requires at least two people, the implicit activities of the therapist are also theoretically increasingly given weight. This was done on the one hand under the concept of countertransference [5], projective identification [6] and the bipersonal field [7]. In my own writings and research, I had set up a model of the relationship process in which I had distinguished the channels of hearing, smell, sight, touch and warmth-sensation and had assigned them to the behavioural classes, language, body movements, affect display, illustrator’s body movements. What has been neglected so far were the therapist's own body perceptions, such as proprioception, afferents, efferent and efferent copies? Finally, the importance of smells was only dealt with very marginally, although they obviously play a major role in implicit communication. This article aims to show that they make the decisive contributions to countertransference. The integration of the different perceptions is made in this behaviour. In addition, both patients and therapists seem to show extraordinarily large interindividual differences in the ability to perceive such sensory perceptions without them noticing it themselves.