Couch potato: Some remarks concerning the body of psychoanalysis

Abstract

Kadi indicates a shift from the former twofold understanding of psychoanalysis as consisting of therapy and research towards a threefold arrangement that includes therapy, research and the production of a metapsychology. This shift along with the technological progress in the field of neuroscience creates a potentially productive conflict for a neuroscientific reformulation of psychoanalysis. The author identifies the human body in its various conceptions as being at the core of this conflict. The body is seen alternately as a Lacanian mirror image, as an organless body bordering between the biological and the psychical, and as a medical body constituted by colorful but decidedly fantastic images can be developed through state-of-the-art imaging technology. Over and against these conflicting tendencies, Kadi calls for psychoanalysis to attend to the relevance of the neurological body and consider its relation to other concepts of the human body, in order for psychoanalysis to remain true to its calling to make the unconscious conscious.