02/12/2025
“The burning question when one enters analysis is ‘Who am I?’ The immediate problem, however, as soon as powerful emotions begin to surface, is often a psyche/soma split. While women tend to talk about their bodies more than men, both sexes in our culture are grievously unrelated to their own body experience. Women say, ‘I don’t like this body’; men say, ‘It hurts.’ Their use of the third-person neuter pronoun in referring to their body makes quite clear their sense of alienation…
The body had become the whipping post. If the person is anxious, the body is starved, gorged, drugged, intoxicated, forced to vomit, driven into exhaustion or frenzied reaction against self-destruction. When this magnificent animal attempts to send up warning signals, it is silenced with pills.
Many people can listen to their cat more intelligently than they can listen to their own despised body. Because they attend to their pet in a cherishing way, it returns their love. Their body, however, may have to let out an earth-shattering scream in order to be heard at all…
It is possible that the scream that comes from the forsaken body, the scream that manifests in a symptom, is the cry of the soul that can find no other way to be heard. If we have lived behind a mask all our lives, sooner or later—if we are lucky—the mask will be smashed. Then we will have to look in our own mirror at our own reality.
Perhaps we will be appalled. Perhaps we will look into the terrified eyes of our own tiny child, that child who has never known love and who now beseeches us to respond. The child is alone, forsaken before we left the womb, or at birth, or when we began to please our parents and learned to put on our best performance in order to be accepted. As life progresses, we may continue to abandon our child by pleasing others—teachers, professors, bosses, friends, partners, even analysts. That child who is our very soul cries out from underneath the rubble of our lives, begging us to say, ‘You are not alone. I love you.”
~ Marion Woodman, ‘The Pregnant Virgin: A Process of Psychological Transformation’, pp. 24 - 25.
Extended Quote sourced by Charlotte Hoffman (.analyst)
Image Credit: Title unknown, illustration by Chinese artist Hao Hao
