The Body-Mind Problem in Psychoanalytic Treatment Technique
Rainer Krause and Hardy Maas
In recent times, many important publications have emerged that deal with the importance of implicit
communication in the therapeutic relationship [1-3]. They assume that success or failure is largely due
to the handling of this event. The Saarbrücken research group has shown empirically that this is a valid
assumption [4]. Since communication always requires at least two people, the implicit activities of the
therapist are also theoretically increasingly given weight. This was done on the one hand under the
concept of countertransference [5], projective identification [6] and the bipersonal field [7]. In my own
writings and research, I had set up a model of the relationship process in which I had distinguished the
channels of hearing, smell, sight, touch and warmth-sensation and had assigned them to the behavioural
classes, language, body movements, affect display, illustrator’s body movements. What has been
neglected so far were the therapist's own body perceptions, such as proprioception, afferents, efferent
and efferent copies? Finally, the importance of smells was only dealt with very marginally, although
they obviously play a major role in implicit communication. This article aims to show that they make the
decisive contributions to countertransference. The integration of the different perceptions is made in this
behaviour. In addition, both patients and therapists seem to show extraordinarily large interindividual
differences in the ability to perceive such sensory perceptions without them noticing it themselves
