1st Edition
Bodies and Social Rhythms Navigating Unconscious Vulnerability and Emotional Fluidity
This exciting new book traces the development of an unfolding challenge for psychoanalytic attention, which augments contemporary theoretical lenses focusing on structures of meaning, with an accompanying registration different than and interacting with structural experience. This accompanying registration of experience is given the term ‘fluidity’ in order to characterize it as too fast moving and unformulated to be symbolized with linguistic categorization.
Expanding attention from speech meaning to include embodied registrations of rhythm involving tonality, pauses and accents can catalyze additional and often emotionally more significant communications central to the state of the transactional field in any psychoanalytic moment. This perspective is contextualized within recognition of how cultural practices and beliefs are carried along both structural and fluid registrations of experience and can shape emotional turbulence for both interactants in a clinical encounter. Experiences of gender, culture, class and race emerging as sources of conflict and mis-recognition are engaged and illustrated throughout the text.
This book, part of the popular "Psychoanalysis in a New Key" book series, will appeal to teaching and practicing psychoanalysts, but also an increasing volume of therapists attending to embodied experience in their practice and drawn to the practical clinical illustrations.
Introduction: Formative Influences 01. Body Rhythms and the Unconscious: Toward a Reformulation of Clinical Attention with the Polyrhythmic Weave 02. Conceptualizing Attunement Within the Polyrhythmic Weave: The Psychoanalytic Samba 03. Narrating the Fluidity of Micro-Patterning: Found in Translation Perhaps 04. Between Body, Culture and Subjectivity: The Tensions of Passion and Custom 05. The Fluidity of Emotions and Clinical Vulnerability: A Field of Rhythmic Tensions 06. Fanon’s Vision of Embodied Racism for Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice 07. From Where Have We Come and Where Might We Be Going?
Biography
Steven H. Knoblauch, PhD, is a Clinical Adjunct Associate Professor at the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, New York University. He is author of The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue (2000) and a co-author of Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment (2005).
"Have you ever considered the way experience that goes unregistered or unsymbolized – the unformulated, the somatic, the unthought known, the 'something more' – might be both shaped by, and contribute to shaping, clinical process? Have you thought about psychoanalysis as the creation, via this kind of work, of 'communion' with the other, and eventually a sense of community? These are the crucial themes explored by Steven Knoblauch in this book. Today, with increasing awareness that psychoanalysis must attend as much to our embeddedness in cultures as it does to traditional individual development, this message is as timely as it is fascinating."
- Donnel B. Stern, PhD, William Alanson White Institute and NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
"Since the publication of his first book, Steven Knoblauch has expanded our ideas about the musicalities of psychoanalytic engagement. In Bodies and Social Rhythms, he establishes himself as not only a creative theorist, but as a thorough historian of psychoanalytic thought. He writes personally, guiding us through his own development as a clinician and theorist whose feet are firmly planted in ideals of both psychoanalytic and community-based action and communion. This book offers a wonderfully rich history of psychoanalytic notions of attachment and symbolization, but they are held in a constant tension with the social. He ends by turning to Fanon in a chapter that is a must-read for anyone attempting to come to grips with the ways the social and the unconscious co-mingle to support or disrupt communion and recognition."
- Katie Gentile, PhD, Professor of Gender Studies, Chair, Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY
"The focus of this book is the amazing expansion in the psychoanalytic horizon when attending to micro-moments of the embodied emotional flux and rhythms that manifest the unconscious non-symbolic experience. Clinical dense descriptions of these micro-moments demonstrate how embodied gestures are also determined by the cultural and social context that extends beyond analyst and patient. Preserving its value, the author questions the restrictions of the structural cognitive frame that has predominated in psychoanalysis. A frame that has defended from the vulnerability inherent in surrendering to the porousness of shared bodies. A must-read to acknowledge the curative power that lies dormant beyond interpretation."
- Juan Francisco Jordan-Moore, MD, Psychiatrist, Psychoanalyst, President IARPP-Chile, Attached Associate Professor, Psychology School of the Catholic University of Chile, Member IARPP Board
