The Somatic Unconscious

The thesis that the body holds an unconscious continuous with the dream’s, and that its symptoms are symbolic utterances of the psyche. Woodman’s formulation: “The body sends messages from the unconscious just as dreams send messages” (Woodman 1993, p. 115). She extends carl-jung‘s naming of specific illnesses as psychic statements — “Jung called cancer a disease of despair, arthritis a disease of silent rage. Skin problems may indicate conflicts that are very close to consciousness. If the problem is profoundly deep and a long way from consciousness, it may manifest in the bowel” (Woodman 1993).

The method Woodman develops from this thesis is continuous with active-imagination but conducted through the body. “First we identify a positive dream image and then we feed it to the body via the imagination. For example, a woman dreams of a beautiful flower. I ask her to picture that flower inside her body — in a place that she experiences as ‘dark,’ usually the uterus or feminine organs. When she does this, she generates energy in this area” (Woodman 1993, p. 17). The image enters the body on the breath; the body responds, often with emotion long refused — grief that surfaces as tears, rage that surfaces as trembling, a mother complex that releases as mucous pouring from nose and eyes (Woodman 1993, p. 17). What had been repressed as flesh is read back as meaning. The body is not the residue of psychic life but one of its primary texts.

Relationships

• embodied-consciousness
• active-imagination
• dreams-via-regia
• body-as-psychic-substrate

Primary sources

• woodman-conscious-femininity-interviews (Woodman 1993)
• woodman-owl-bakers-daughter (Woodman 1980)