Psychoanalytic Interpretation as Body in Statu Nascendi

In 1965 Martin Heidegger, in a seminar in Zurich makes a brief reference to the body. There he speaks of the difference between the body as a physical body, which ends at the skin, and the live body, for which the Germans have a special word, Leib.  The Ancients named it Δέμας. Let us call it 'bio-body'. Which are now the limits of the bio-body?

Heidegger:

I sit here at the table and I occupy the space surrounded by my skin. But then, there is no reference to here, where I am, but only to the position of this physical body at this point. [...] Pointing with the finger to the window over there, I don't end at my fingertips. So where are the limits of the bio-body? [...] The limits of the bio-body is the horizon [...] in which I reside. That's why the limits of the bio-body change constantly as the range of my residency changes. 

So when I point to the window, my bio-body extends, beyond my fingertips, till there. 

Another example: 

pebble in the sea

The children's bio-body doesn't end at their fingertips but where the pebble hits the water, where the ripple from the impact on the water disappears. Children, while throwing pebbles in the water, experience precisely this magic, that their body doesn't end at the skin. For this reason, amazed, they  play this game obsessively.

Now the verses of Giorgos Seferis from "Santorini" come strangely to life:

let your hands go traveling if you can

here on time's curve with the ship

that touched the horizon. (...)

let your hands go traveling if you can

and sink.

The poem refers to Nekyia, to the ship of Odysseus which arrives to the Underworld. The hands, i.e. the bio-body, are asked to travel, that is to go as far as the place of the dead. 

The voice. As my body extends, traveling with the ship, or following the course of the pebble, so is the case with my voice, which stretches my body, the bio-body,  up to the one I am addressing. 

The Japanese theatre director Toshiharu Takeuchi developed an exercise for what lies in each conversation when one addresses someone. In this exercise, two people stand facing each other. A addresses B with a short phrase, e.g. "Shall we go to the cafeteria?" or  "You look beautiful today." Then B turns his back to him, and A addresses the back of B. When B feels that A is really addressing him, he turns and answers. At first, most people do not notice anything special, they just turn and answer.  

The teacher suggests they listen to A addressing them once more and pay close attention to whether A is really addressing them. And then gradually the students look puzzled and say different things, such as: 

- It seems like A is not   addressing me but someone next to me.  A addressed someone standing two-three steps behind me. - A addressed someone over and beyond my head. 

- The voice of A doesn't reach me. - I thought that A addressed me, but I am not really sure.

Or among others: -The voice of A touched my back. - It touched my ear and flew away. - It rolled on my back. - Now the voice of A hit me hard. 

And the ones participating in the exercise as observants, notice that slowly they can see the traces of the voice. Many times these  form a curve and then fall down. They split in various directions. They hit the target and fly away, outwardly.

Let us try now to recognize the so-understood bio-body, here and now. I speak to you, yet I speak into the microphone. My body extends to the device I have in front of me. Now I let go off the microphone. With my voice, which now you really hear, my body extends to you. My bio-body has you as its limits. It is defined by you. With your hearing, that receives my voice, your body extends to me. Your bio-body has me as its limit. It is defined by me.

Thus, my bio-body is never my own, in the sense I feel my own my physical body. When we speak to each other, when we hear each other, we are one body, we are dispersed in one body. In a poem, Paul Celan refers to the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstamm:

the name Ossip comes toward you,

you tell him what he knows already, he accepts it, takes it off you, with hands,

you detach his arm at the shoulder, the right one, the left one, 

you fasten your own in their place, 

with hands, with fingers, with lines, 

- what was torn off grows back together

- there you have it, take it, you've got them both

the name, the name, the hand, the hand, 

take them as a pledge, 

he takes that too, and you have 

back what is yours what was his

Heidegger does not reach this far. Merleau-Ponty does, and actually 20 years earlier, in his work "Phenomenology of perception":

It's as if the intention of the other person was residing in my body, and mine in his. 

Hypnotized by the dominant mode of feeling and thinking we ignore such things. Their expressed experiences can be found, Merleau-Ponty continues, 

in the child who learns to speak, or in the author who says and thinks something for the first time, eventually in everyone who transforms a certain kind of silence in speech. ... Our view of man remains superficial as long as we miss going back to that origin, as long as we miss finding, under the chatter of words, the primordial silence, and as long as we don't describe the act that breaks this silence. 

The primordial level. It interests us because the psychoanalytic conversation culminates exactly at the fortunate times where there is a return to such a "first time". As in the child and the author. The Japanese thinker Keiji Nishitani too speaks of the occurrence of the first time: 

This request is like an incision, because it asks us to return to our original "self" […], to disclaim once and for all those entrenched schemata and prototypes which confine our thinking, feeling, and will  in standardized and seemingly eternal contexts. We are asked to return to the most fundamental level, where man is simply man, or rather the son of man, nothing less and nothing more; where he is completely exposed, uncovered, naked, with empty hands, barefoot, but also where he can frankly open the innermost of his heart. 

A word born out of silence is not just a word. Merleau-Ponty calls it geste, which as the english gesture, is not just a gesture but concerns the expressiveness of the whole body, it concerns the pulsating bio-body. The word born out of silence, Merleau-Ponty writes, 

is geste, and its meaning the world

What does it mean "its meaning the world"? Seferis gives an answer when he speaks of the work of the poet as a struggle

[...] to find that voice which identifies [...] with the things he wants to create, or, if we want, which creates things by naming them. The extreme limit which the poet reaches is to be able to say "let there be light" and becomes light.

That is, Merleau-Ponty continues, 

(...) when we take into account the emotional content of words, what we previously called "bodily expressiveness", which is fundamental in poetry, for example, it might appear that the words, the vowels and phonemes are so many ways to 'sing' the world (...)

In Ancients ἑρμηνεύω (interpret) means: translate, especially from a foreign language. But foreign is not only the language spoken by other people. Foreign is also the language, this above all, of the primordial silence from which something is said for the first time. Thus Pericles, Thucydides writes, speaks of himself as man who is able to

γνῶναί τε τὰ δέοντα καὶ ἑρμηνεῦσαι ταῦτα

be aware of what is appropriate and  to ἑρμηνεῦσαι (translate) it. In this case appropriate are not some written rules and laws. It's the state of the Peloponnesian War, not in the view of its events, but in the acoustics of its silence, a silence which bears what is appropriate. ἑρμηνεία  translates this silence and the translation is a word of the first time. 

For this reason, Plato says poets

 ἑρμηνῆς εἰσιν τῶν θεῶν

They translate into words Gods' silence.

The psychoanalyst, as I see it, is an  ἑρμηνεύς: interpreter, if you will, not of the words of his client, these are translated only in the trivial language of theoretical models, but of the silent halo, their still aura. To that extent it relates to the small child who utters words for the first time, the politician who interprets what's appropriate, with the poet who senses the silences in the air. Here the psychoanalyst speaks not only with the head, not only with the heart, and certainly not only with the mouth. He speaks with his whole body, or better, his whole body speaks. And this is an issue that, as far as I know, psychology and psychoanalysis ignore. Because they are entrapped in the cognitive dichotomy of psyche and body  and they don't even suspect that which was referred to as the bio-body. The poets know it, but not as knowledge but as experience. Seferis:

Deep down, the poet has one theme: his living body

And Celan in a letter:

Only real hands write real poems. I don't see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem.

Listen to this too by Peter Handke:

I raised my hand to greet the bird on the bush, and I felt the figure of the greeted one on my palm.

In the film of Ingmar Bergman "Persona"