Understanding the Embodiment of Narrative in the Therapeutic Exchange
September 27, 2025

Carnal Hermeneutics and the Locus of Meaning

Jack Foehl. Ph.D.

When it comes to narrative, where do we locate meaning? In so many Western traditions, including psychoanalysis, there has been a longstanding neglect or repression of the body. The early body work of Wilhelm Reich was sidelined by theorists who centered on the spoken word, verbalizations threaded into narratives that offer symbols for interpretation. Interpretation was most often understood as a process that takes place in language. Narrative, the story we tell, becomes the text to be interpreted. In turn, the body was understood as the site of the symptom, the locus of the non-symbolic that required symbolic interpretation by the analyst.

But what if sensation is the first point of interpretation, what if the skin is the primary site of interpretation prior to conceptualization? I want to think about what the philosopher Richard Kearney calls “carnal hermeneutics,” proposing that a reading of meaning comes from sensuous, carnal experience. His central claim is that we meaningfully feel before we think, that meaning is not primarily abstract, but fully embodied. This draws from Merleau-Ponty’s notion that we are not minds who have bodies but rather that we are bodies that perceive and interpret. Interpretation is a lived, felt process rooted in our visceral, sensory encounters with the world. We touch, smell, taste, hear, and see interpretively, and this is the most vital register of narrative from which any psychoanalytic process proceeds.

For the many clinicians among us, consider our typical experience in psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic supervision. We sit down with a supervisor and describe a treatment in narrative form. Most of our time in supervision is spent reviewing clinical “process.” But what does process mean? In the vernacular, it refers to the supervisee’s written, detailed notes of a session, the “he said, she said” of the session. The supervisee comes with a notepad containing the verbal exchange of an hour, written from memory or transcribed from a recording of the session. The supervisor listens as the treater reads what was said in the hour. This is often considered the primary data of the treatment, constituting a detailed narrative that attempts to capture what happened in a single session and in a series of sessions. Of course, we try to listen to what comes between the words. We try to attend to the silence of the session, to the nuance of a lived experience. Some supervisees will try to capture the inflection, the cadence, the tone of voice in the hour, an attempt to breathe alive the words on the page. When we watch a video, we might capture the gesture and the dance of speech. But so often this is reduced to an almost exclusive focus on what is said, on the content of our communication. This is true even in this age, which increasingly acknowledges the value of process, in the sense of attending to being, over the value content or knowing. Even though we are more attuned to the experience of saying over the derived meaning of what is said, it still often reduces to interpreting what is talked about.

In response to this supervisory dilemma, I’ve taken to writing what I call micro-process, where I attempt to use words that are experienced as breath, with a deep reciprocal movement between sensory expression and reception. I’d like to offer one example that I’ve presented before, but it characterizes well the “something different” of process description where language is used in another way:

Of course, this description constitutes a verbal narrative of its own, but with it, I attempt to describe a kind of sensual sense-making. Richard Kearney says that there is a deep and inextricable relationship between sensation and interpretation. We are concerned with a hermeneutics, an act of interpretation, that, as he says, “goes all the way down.” Sense and sensibility are intertwined in a carnal hermeneutics where narrative meaning finds expression on the level of the tactile. Consider what this means in our everyday living-in-the-world. With and in our skin, with flesh, we are continually attuning and attuned. We immediately, prereflectively, discriminate between hot and cold, hard and soft, attractive and unattractive, safe and risky, and all the points in between.

Open a refrigerator door and notice the marriage of touch and taste in a constant flow as we feel and smell the cool fridge air and glance from one shelf to another, our lips subtly smacking and our gut growling in anticipation of a late-night snack. Notice, as we take in with surprising delight the sight of a slice of apple pie from dinner that we had assumed our son had greedily inhaled earlier. But then, we recoil with a vague feeling of disgust as we remember his story of a restaurant waiter-friend dribbling a glob of mucus-green spittle in a patron’s dessert as retribution for a nasty remark.

Our son’s dessert story folds in seamlessly with our body-at-the- moment. We move with a register of feeling in the dual sense of emotionality and touch, that characterizes how every encounter is an engagement with touch. Consider the layerings of interpretive subtlety to be found in the nature of tact and tactlessness, or in the nature of taste and

the tasteless, in how our experience traverses the gustatory and the aesthetic, how reason is lodged in our physicality. The dessert narrative is already embodied. In its first description and subsequent memory by Dad, it lives in a disgustingly immediate way that animates the story beyond a series of words conveying content. Even in the telling today, we feel the movement of appetite and disgust, a carnal movement that interpretively expresses the meaning of what is lived through.

As a young boy, Kearny would skip along an Irish beach and sing a little jingle, “I see the sea and the sea sees me!” (I wish I knew the melody to that). And indeed, there is a reciprocity or reversibility to our sensations. Seeing always implies the possibility of being seen, hearing the possibility of being heard. And with touching, there is a seamless movement between touching and the experience of being touched. This deepens the immersive interpretive presence because we are never quite separate from the world of things and others and spaces we inhabit. Although others are in some basic essential ways a mystery to me, their mystery sings to us through their expression, their tact, and, as Merleau-Ponty would say, their style of being. Their carnal unconscious in its meaningfulness registers in me in ways far beyond the words that we might find to capture it.

In my encounter with Joan, her smell wasn’t simply a conviction that she narrated to me with her words. The narrative was alive in her carnal engagement with me and her surroundings. For Joan, the olfactory world was foregrounded in a way that bent the lens of experience, much like gravity bends light around a black hole. In those moments of that session, I entered a world of odor, where the sight and sound and the feeling of a space, distorted into a textured microcosm of smell. Time slowed and opened a salient discomfort of being caught in my skin. The sound of space shifted where the normal centering on dialogue slid into the subtle noises of movement that surrounded us, and then to the sound of bodies, mine and hers. I was aware of my insides, the feel and gurgle of organ motion. And then our faces grew in size like distorted homunculi with openings or holes, and the sound of her lips and breath, and feeling my own tissue with this horrible sense of an activating vibratory tingling on the rims of my opening, a threat of entry, a deep vulnerability that felt both menacing and sexual.

Smell organized as penetration in sight, feel, sound, and almost taste. I was on the rim of something unwanted and then, **sniff** a spasm, not just for me, but for her as well, and something passed between us. She blushed and smiled at me, and I felt unwillingly captured, found out in a bashful way as we sat in our post-coital fumes.

This is only a partial narrative of something deeply ineffable, alive, hidden, and yet seen in its unspoken unconscious transparency. And as inconceivable as it might sound, it is a carnal throb of meaning that is there in every moment of the “process” of our work.