Fabricated bodies: a model for the somatic false self.
This paper draws attention to a particular use of the body, one in which basic psychical security is achieved through a radical detachment from body vitality, necessitating the creation of a coercive regime of psychosomatic control and autostimulation for purposes of artificial enlivenment of the self. When the personality is organized predominantly along the lines of a systematic dissociation (and then pseudo-integration) of the mental and the somatic realms of psychical life, the psyche-soma undergoes a far-reaching transmutation: the desiring body is eclipsed and replaced with a fabricated body. Clinical observation of this set-up is obscured by the fact that, in these cases, the body is deployed in a 'realistic' manner, rather than in a recognizably symptomatic way. It is, indeed, the hallmark of a successful somatic false-self organization that the colonization of the body is disguised as natural, ego-syntonic and compatible with social norms. The treatment approach requires a broadening of analytic attention to apprehend shifts in states of consciousness and psychophysical cues.
909 Ordway Avenue, Albany, CA 94706, USA. plgoldberg@excite.com
Peter
P
Goldberg
D000328:Adult; D001828:Body Image; D004213:Dissociative Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D004532:Ego; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008960:Models, Psychological; D011602:Psychophysiologic Disorders / Q000523:psychology*; D019455:Self Psychology; D012945:Social Values; D014342:Truth Disclosure