Touch

Reviews / Votes

'Playing on Winnicott's famous claim that there is no such thing as a baby but only a baby-in-relation, Susie Orbach persuasively s that there is no such thing as a body! Bodies, like selves, emerge in relation to others. In this welcome collection, Kate White has gathered together the presentations from the Tenth John Bowlby Memorial Conference so that we can explore issues of the body and the historically taboo subject of touch in psychoanalysis. 'The authors, all of whom utilize the framework of contemporary attachment theory, challenge the discipline's neglect of touch and move toward a relational conceptualization of bodies and selves-in-relation. Clinical attention is paid to traumatised patients who have been brought up with little experience of loving touch as well as to the complex difficulties raised when touch enters the consulting room. This collection demonstrates that although the body may have been undertheorised by attachment theorists, it has always been implicit. Touch: Attachment and The Body is a significant and valuable addition to the exploration of the body in contemporary relational psychoanalysis.'- Lewis Aron, Ph.D., Director, New York University, Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy & Psychoanalysis. Co-editor with F. S. Anderson, (1998) of Relational Perspectives on the Body