Psychoanalysis Is a Somato-Psychic Therapy

Most analysands, or those who present for the first time, approach therapy with the expectation of verbal answers, clear interpretations, or “targeted” interventions. This expectation is understandable, because the conscious level of experience is organized through symbols, narratives, and causal connections. However, the deeper processes of dysregulation, especially when archaic survival regimes are activated, are not transformed through immediate interpretive intervention but through the establishment of a regulatory field, through repeated cycles of dysregulation and repair within the relationship. The text argues that psychoanalysis is a somato-psychic therapy of regulation and that recognition constitutes a biopsychic precondition for survival rather than merely symbolic affirmation. The therapeutic process is not exhausted in dialogue or in the exchange of interpretations, but unfolds within the unconscious somato-psychic field of the encounter, through repeated cycles of dysregulation and repair within the relationship. The psychoanalyst’s silence is understood as an active regulatory stance, when it is somato-psychically processed and grounded in inner endurance. Technique presupposes a functional observing ego, the capacity for meta-observation, and differentiation between what is one’s own and what is foreign, so that symbolization and meaning-making follow regulation. Personal analysis and supervision constitute foundational conditions of ethical and technical competence, as they organize differentiation at points where countertransference tends to blur it. The depressive position is presented as a form of psychic complexity capable of bearing absence, ambiguity, and loss without collapse, while the withdrawal of recognition activates archaic survival functions (freezing of communication, dichotomizations, control, somatic discharges). Finally, it is stated that a biological substrate—archaic sensorimotor traces already from embryonic life—precedes the constitution of the psyche, upon which the psyche is formed as a psychic organization that requires the other in order to be regulated and to acquire meaning, with this regulatory logic extending from the dyadic encounter to community and institutions.