In spite of our human tendency to maintain a relatively stable psychic economy and thus guarantee a more-or-less enduring personality pattern, we are liable to produce any or all of these diverse creations at different periods in our lives. In the attempt to maintain some form of psychic equilibrium under all circumstances, every human being is capacle of creating a neurosis, a psychosis, a pathological character pattern, a sexual perversion, a work of art, a dream, or a psychosomatic malady. This brings me to the first point of my paper: the importance of man's innate capacity for symbolic activity and psychical creation, and in particular, the heterogeneous character of these creations. It provides a bulwark against psychic loss in traumatic circumstances and in the long run in man's psychic creativity may well lie an essential element of protection against his biological destruction. This much we know: the structuring of the psyche is a creative process destined to give each individual his unique identity. Long before such complicated psychic creations are absorbed the baby must first have been seduced to life by his mother, for herein lies the initial movement which stirs the first glimmerings of psychic life. Considerably more knowledge has been garnered by psychoanalysis about that still more mysterious leap in the other direction, the leap from mind to body which underlies hysterical conversion and the various inhibitions of bodily functioning.

In the earliest attempt to deal with physical pain, frustration and absence psychically we have the first 'mysterious leap' from body to mind. When this occurs, body and mind have somehow lost their connecting links. It may go unnoticed while its insidious effects continue, silently, like the Freudian death instinct.

Yet such catastrophic failure does not necessarily result in a startling psychosis. Failure to sort oneself out from the 'not-me' environment and so to create a sense of personal identity produces more catastrophic results than does a similar failure in the acquisition of sexual identity and the rights which belong to it. 'The inherent difficulty facing the infant in his task of becoming an individual is of a more global, more 'psychosomatic' nature than the problems encountered in coming to terms with sexual realities.

She was a renowned French psychoanalyst and author of many books, including: Theaters of the Mind, Theaters of the Body, The Many Faces of Eros, and Plea for a Measure of Abnormality.

With sadness we note the passing of Joyce McDougall on August 24th, 2011.

Theaters Of The Body by Joyce McDougall