Body memory occupies a contested yet generative space within depth-psychological and trauma-oriented literature, designating the capacity of somatic experience to encode, retain, and re-enact experiential material outside the reach of conscious narrative recall. The concept derives its clinical urgency from the observation — traceable to Pierre Janet and elaborated by Ogden, van der Kolk, and Levine — that traumatic experience inscribes itself in musculature, autonomic arousal, and procedural movement patterns that persist long after declarative memory has faded or been foreclosed. This somatic register is understood as a subset of implicit memory, distinguished from explicit autobiographical recall by its non-linguistic, non-conscious character. Neuroscientific contributors such as Damasio and Siegel ground the concept in the brain’s continuous mapping of bodily states, arguing that body representations are the infrastructural substrate upon which consciousness and selfhood are built. Phenomenologists, notably Merleau-Ponty, contest the classical dichotomy between body-as-mechanism and consciousness-as-interiority, insisting that motor and postural memory constitute a pre-reflective intentionality irreducible to cognitive representation. Fogel extends this to show how unrealized motor impulses from trauma become chronically embedded as muscle tension. The central clinical tension concerns whether body memories require narrative integration to be therapeutically resolved, or whether somatic sequencing alone — tracking sensation, movement, and autonomic shift — constitutes sufficient processing.