New Books In Psychoanalysis

Being with the Body in Depth Psychology: Development, Trauma, and Transformation in the Unspoken Realm (Routledge, 2024), featuring a foreword by Donald Kalsched, examines the integration of the subjectively experienced body in the practice of depth psychology. Barbara Holifield draws from philosophical perspectives, neuroscientific and infant research, developmental theory, and trauma studies to offer a comprehensive overview of embodiment within a relationally based psychoanalytic approach. Clinical vignettes demonstrate the critical value of working with the bodily-felt dimension of implicit relational memory and emphasize how bodily-felt sense facilitates access to feelings. The primacy of bodily-based knowing revealed through infant research illuminates an interior world of sensorial apprehension that conceptually based knowing and psychoanalytic thought often overlook. Furthermore, it establishes the body as intrinsic to relational life. Freud’s 1923 statement that “The ego is first and foremost