Like the belly of a bird breathing: On Winnicott’s “Mind and its Relation to the Psyche-soma”

In "Mind and its relation to the psyche-soma," Winnicott reinvents the concept of psyche-soma by viewing it as a set of experiences located neither in the body nor in the brain, and in fact, not located anywhere. Psyche, in health, is understood to be the imaginative functioning of mental processes, and soma is understood to be the experience of physical realness and aliveness. Winnicott offers a clinical illustration of work with a patient who feels unreal to herself. He describes a juncture in the analysis in which the patient's somatic functioning is everything, while Winnicott, by feeling his own breathing and watching the patient breathe, knows that she is alive. This is the beginning of her becoming able to experience her breathing (soma) and imagining (psyche) as real, alive, and her own.Among the concepts Winnicott alludes to, and that I develop, are (1) the idea that in his clinical work Winnicott not only lives an experience with the patient, he also brings an unspoken structure of meaning to the experience, and the two are inseparable; and (2) the idea that Winnicott introduces a set of terms and a way of thinking that is independent of the differentiation of conscious and unconscious mind (Freud's topographic model). These ideas include aliveness and deadness, realness and unrealness, being and disruption of being.