Leikert, Sebastian (2021). 'Encapsulated body engrams and somatic narration - integrating body memory into psychoanalytic technique'. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 102, 4, 671-88. https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2021.1927044.

Besides the symbolic unconscious, psychoanalysis today investigates unconscious structures that are dissociated from mental functioning (Lombardi 2017) and encoded in bodily inscriptions. These bodily configurations often stay outside of the psychoanalytical attention and technique of treatment. Two concepts - encapsulated body engrams and somatic narration - provide a theoretical and technical proposition for the bodily encoded unconscious.

Petrification and Revitalization: The Role of Somatic Narration in Working Through A War Trauma.

Psychoanal Q

September 2023

Lindenstraße 8, Saarbrücken 66128, Germany

The author investigates bodily aspects of the defense organization in the treatment of a soldier suffering from a war traumatization. The patient reports two situations-a bomb attack and the subsequent confrontation with wounded comrades-that had a traumatizing impact. In the treatment process, a phase of stagnation is described before the shared attention is focused on the bodily perception of the patient.

Unrepresented States and the Bodily Encoded Unconscious.

Psychoanal Q

April 2023

Lindenstraße 8 66128 Saarbrücken.

are considered important obstacles to the psychoanalytic process. They describe elements that are beyond the reach of the symbolic network with which psychoanalysis is used to working. The emergence of unrepresented states has often been described as the failure of the caregiver to symbolize the child's emotions and thereby enable the child to connect his or her bodily states to the psychic representation.

Encapsulated body engrams and somatic narration - Integrating body memory into psychoanalytic technique.

Int J Psychoanal

August 2021

Indipendent Researcher, Saarbrücken, Germany.

Beginning with the observation that a good integration of soma and psyche is often missing in our work with severely disturbed analysands, two concepts are discussed that focus constellations of bodily encoded unconscious material, which needs a specific form of working-through. The concept of encapsulated body engrams referring to defence structures revolving around the inhibition or disorganization of an affective bodily impulse is outlined. The imbalance arising this way is perceived as a foreign body within the body-self.

'For Beauty is nothing but the barely endurable onset of Terror': Outline of a general psychoanalytic aesthetics.

Int J Psychoanal

June 2017

Lindenstraße 8, D-66128, Saarbrücken.

Even close to 80 years after Freud's words that psychoanalysis "has scarcely anything to say about beauty" (Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, SE 21, p. 82) the question of a specific psychoanalytic aesthetic is still faced with a deficit in theory. Since aesthetics is related to Aisthesis, the Greek word for 'perception', a psychoanalytic aesthetic can solely emerge from a psychoanalysis of perceptive structures.