| This dissertation reviews a number of psychoanalytic theories of the mind and body in order to lay a foundation for further theorizing on the process of generative thinking between patient and therapist. The author proposes that when a patient begins to allow bodily, emotional, and languaged self-experiences to come into dialogue with one another, patterns of rigidity are loosened and the patient and therapist are able to experience a creative, generative exchange with one another. This exchange and the experiences that lead up to this exchange during the process of generative thinking have two requirements: (a) an awareness in the observation of the inter-relationship among bodily, emotional, and languaged experience; and (b) a willingness to foster curiosity in a process of inquiry about what might unfold in this inter-relationship.;The author theorizes that bodily experience cannot be considered as secondary to either affect or language in this process. Instead, the body plays a key and essential role in a patient's capacity to think generatively. The author reviews and synthesizes the core issues and concepts that key theorists, including Winnicott, Bion, and Britton, have contributed to the question of how the thinking mind develops. The author extends this synthesis into original theory by reflecting on her own experiences as both a therapist and a patient. Using her experiences in the therapeutic space as a point of inquiry (rather than as a marker of concrete, unchanging truth) into the process of generative thinking and the body's place in that process, she articulates shifts that occur for the patient and therapist between three states/spaces: (a) an incubation state/space within the treatment in which the body is used as a site of good-enough holding and alpha function; (b) a state/space in which the expansion of internal space occurs allowing room for an internal third and the receiving of an other; and (c) a generative thinking and exchange state/space where the subjectivities of both the therapist and patient are acknowledged and at play with one another. The author concludes by discussing specific implications of this theory for training and practice. |
