How Does the Embodiment of Memory Affect Therapeutic Relationships?
December 6th, 2025

In Wilhelm Reich’s understanding of character, the memory of our relational development and interpersonal history is always present in our stance and our style of being. He saw the muscular armour of the body’s tensions and rigidity as identical with our psychological defences.

In Norway through the 20th and early 21st century there developed a post-Reichian vision of the therapeutic situation as defined by bodily identification and unconscious embodied communication. Our co-host in today’s discussion, Jon Sletvold, is the foremost international proponent of this tradition. From this perspective, the unconscious in the therapeutic situation is largely what happens between the two of us at a physical, visceral and procedural level, outside of direct awareness. The therapeutic relationship is shaped by our unconscious choices, patterns and expectations, which are all aspects of our bodily organismic functioning, as well as by our histories. Our unconscious memories of what it means to be a social animal are found in the explicit and subtle reactions of our body and nervous system, which is constantly sensing and responding to the environment, not least to the physical being and implicit communication of the person with whom we are sitting. Our subtle interpersonal choreography and habitual strategies of co-regulation create much of the dynamic within the dyad. Thus the dyad expresses a meeting of our relational histories. That is to say, the interplay of unconscious bodily memories.

In the therapeutic situation, it is you and me. But we have formed our identities and ways of being through various forms of bodily identification with with our parents, caregivers and peers, who all in turn identified with their parents, caregivers and peers.

A warning then to those who might believe that analysis must necessarily lead to the direct verbal expression or symbolisation of traumatic events: We walk with the gait of those who came before us. We carry the echo of events we can never remember, since they occured before our time. We might, as in situations of collective trauma such as holocaust and apartheid, manage to give voice to the true horrors that have occured. But each of us carries also the traces of stories lost to time. Experience is inherited through its physical echo, in our identification with our parents, carried in our stance. In body-to-body transmission within the therapeutic situation, our ancestors are in silent communication with each other. May they lay their weapons down.

Some brief clinical vignettes

Vignette 1: Meet my Mother – Countertransference as dissociated memory

A woman comes to me for for therapy. She has issues including alcohol abuse, bulimia, anxiety, difficulties with relationships and sex. She talks eloquently, is charming, intense, perhaps a little seductive. In the second session she rises from the chair with wild eyes, walks toward me with her hands held out as if to choke me. She sits down and continues to talk as if it did not happen.

Initially I cannot refer to it. I feel it would be wrong to speak of it. I am alone with the confusion and fear. I am not even sure whether what I remember is real. When I finally ask about it some minutes later, she does not remember. When I describe how she looked as she walked towards me, she answers, “Oh, that’s my Mamma.”

I feel nausea after several early sessions, though they are usually without incident – the unconscious expression of a childhood spent living with a terrifying woman who was completely without boundaries.

Vignette 2: When can we say that we remember?

A patient who for the first two years of therapy has no memory of his childhood. After two years he begins to discover that he was subjected to systematic and sadistic sexal abuse from a young age. The knowledge comes to him in inner language and he re-experiences traumatic events as pain, movements in his limbs, feelings in his body. In session it appears as if he is being forced into different positions in the chair in which he sits. When I tell him I believe him, he asks how I can believe something he does not remember. Because to remember in the way that he means would require an embodied sense that the story being told by his sensations, his pain, his movements and his language is real.

Vignette 3: Post-suicidal Identification

My patient says she feels less like a person, more like a doll subjected to forces beyond her control. My patient is plagued by terrible dissociation and by extreme forms of self harm that leave permanent damage. She suffers with gastric issues and chronic pain. She lives with the constant threat of death. After some years, my patient dies by suicide. A week later, at the time when we would normally meet, I am struck by stomach pain, diarrhea, a headache and an inability to think. I move to rest on my couch and fall unconscious for 15 minutes. When I wake my lymph glands are swollen. I feel that the room is not real. When I speak, my voice is not my voice. I understand this as an intense bodily identification with her in her absence. My body remembers hers.

Some closing thoughts on the internalisation of the object

All the processes I have touched upon in this short presentation are bi-directional. As relational analysis has increasingly emphasised in recent decades, the patient experiences – both consciously and unconsciously – how we are with them. Their body identifies with ours, senses our reactions and styles of regulation, our expansion and contraction. When they take us into their hearts it is because they feel the memories of our bodies together. One patient recently described to me how his alienation and traumatic inner pain had begun to abate because he has the sense that the therapy room we share is within him. We have all heard similar experiences from patients. What is this but a bodily memory of togetherness, a new aspect in our embodied record of relationality?

I recalll when I was in my first clinical placement and felt a sense of foreboding about a coming session with a patient I found challenging. On my way to meet him in the waiting room, I thought of my own analyst, a woman who for me at that time was a model of quiet safety. As I walked down the corridor of the university clinic I did not only recall my sessions with her. I felt a shift in my stride as I began to walk as she walked.