Bodies and Social Rhythms

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.

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).

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?