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Taking Freuds Bodily Ego Seriously: Commentary

by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
Published online: 09 Jan 2014.

To cite this article: Maxine Sheets-Johnstone (2002) Taking Freuds Bodily Ego Seriously: Commentary by Maxine SheetsJohnstone, Neuropsychoanalysis: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Psychoanalysis and the Neurosciences, 4:1, 57-61, DOI:
10.1080/15294145.2002.10773379
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Commentary on The Concept of the Self and the Self Representation

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(2001). The dynamics of embodiment: A eld theory

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Approaches to emotions, eds K. Scherer & P.
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Jaak Panksepp
Chicago Institute for Neurosurgery and
Neuroresearch
Northwestern University Research Park
1801 Maple Ave
Evanston, IL 60201
Correspondence to author at:
April 1June 2, 2002 (and after Sept. 3, 2002)
Dept. of Psychology
Bowling Green State Univ.
Bowling Green, OH 43403
jpankse@bgnet.bgsu.edu
June 3, 2002September 3, 2002
Dept. of Psychology
University of Portsmouth (UK)
Exact address will be provided to Ed Nersessian

Taking Freud's ``Bodily Ego'' Seriously

Commentary by Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

Introduction
In ``The Concept of the Self and the Self
Representation,'' Dr. David Milrod attempts to
clarify the psychoanalytic nature of two seemingly
obvious but dicult concepts, specically with a
view to nding links between psychoanalysis
perhaps particularly psychoanalytic theoryand
present-day neuroscience. His eorts result in a
probing and provocative paper. What I would
like to oer in this commentary is less a critical
review of what is there in the paper than a critical
review of what is not there in the paper and what
might protably be there to the benet of both
psychoanalysis and present-day neuroscience.
In The Ego and the Id, Freud wrote, ``The
ego is rst and foremost a bodily ego'' (Freud,
1955, p. 26). He immediately claried this
statement, pointing out that the ego ``is not
merely a surface entity, but is itself the projection

of a surface.'' He furthermore claried this

clarication in a footnote, which reads: ``I.e.,
the ego is ultimately derived from bodily sensations, chiey from those springing from the
surface of the body. It may thus be regarded as
a mental projection of the surface of the body,
besides, . . . representing the supercies of the
mental apparatus'' (ibid.).
If we follow Freud's initial pithy and
theoretically momentous observation on the
bodily nature of the primordial ego at the same
time that we follow Milrod's thesis that the self
representation is a substructure within the ego
(pp. 810), then we should expect that, in an
originary sense, the self representation is generated from the body, that is, from bodily
experiences. We should, in other words, and
following Milrod's careful beginning distinction
between the self and the self representation (pp. 8
11), expect that actual bodily experiencesliving

58

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bodily aspects of the self or ``psychophysiological

self,'' as Milrod at one point terms it (p. 8)are
the generative source of both the self and the self
representation. We should, in eect, be led to an
appreciation of the corporeal foundation of the
psychic substructures of the ego known as the self
and the self representation.
This concrete bodily foundation, though
intimated once in passing (p. 41) and specied
once in a parenthetical remark (pp. 6263), is
nowhere elucidated in Milrod's exposition. To
bring it to light in ways indicative of its psychoanalytic and neuroscientic signicance to Milrod's
project, I will anchor my commentary in empirical and phenomenologically-oriented studies of
infancy and childhood.1
I
Milrod takes up the received view (e.g., p. 14) that
newborns experience no distinction between self
and non-self. In this context he remarks that
``changes soon appear, and they can begin to
show up within hours after birth.'' He goes on to
describe how ``one can sometimes observe newborns in the delivery room . . . looking into the
overhead delivery room lights and calmly closing
and opening their eyes repetitively, apparently
exploring a newfound ability to turn the lights on
and o.'' He states that ``We might be seeing here
the rst elements of what could evolve into an ego
function, the control of sensory stimulae, and the
rst elements of an awareness of something
belonging to the outside.''
One might readily arm on the basis of
Milrod's observations and comment that the ego
is indeed rst and foremost a bodily ego, but at
the same time nd that nothing more can or need
be said about either the observations or comment.
Two centrally signicant points about infancy,
however, are implicit in Milrod's observations and
commentary and each warrants close attention.
To begin with, something more may be said
of the rst possible signs of ``an ego function.'' To
control sensory stimulae is to be an agent, an
individual who can act or not act, do or not do,
explore or not explore, move him/herself this way
or that, or not move him/herself at all. In
phenomenological terms, to be an agent is to
experience ``I cans'' (Husserl, 1970, 1973, 1980,
1989): for example, I can open and close my eyes;
I can open and close my mouth; I can open and
1
Phenomenologically-oriented studies of infancy and childhood are necessarily constructive in nature. For an explication of a
constructive phenomenology, see Sheets-Johnstone 1999.

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
close my st. I cans are the source of corporeal
concepts. In other words, opening and closing are
not just physical acts of a body; they are acts
subtending concepts, nonlinguistic concepts that
develop on the basis of bodily life. Nonlinguistic
corporeal concepts are in no sense inferior to their
linguistic relatives. On the contrary, they are both
fundamental human concepts in their own right
and the basis on which linguistic concepts initially
arise (for an evolutionary perspective on corporeal concepts including the concept of numbers, of
language, and of death, see Sheets-Johnstone,
1990). Corporeal concepts such as opening and
closing, chewing something to pieces, grasping,
holding, pushing away, and so on, are integral to
developing object (social) relations in both a
literal and gurative sense. They have their origin
in bodily experiences, experiences anchored in
``bodily sensations'' as Freud species, albeit not
necessarily chiey surface ones. Just such experiences are the bedrock of agency and of the
primordial bodily ego.
Empirical studies of infants corroborate the
primordial bodily ego not only in its control of
sensory stimulae but in its ``awareness of something belonging to the outside.'' Two studies in
particular are of moment. Infant/child psychiatrist Daniel Stern (Stern, 1985) describes an
experimental study of Siamese twins prior to
their separation at four months of age. The
experiment consisted in determining any dierence in the bodily movement of the twins when
they were deterred from sucking their own ngers
and when they were deterred from sucking the
ngers of their twin. When a twin's own arm was
pulled away from her mouth by a researcherthe
pulling movement resulting in the twin's own
ngers being pulled out of her mouththe twin
resisted the pull, i.e., she attempted to pull her own
arm back toward herself. When her twin's arm was
pulled away from her mouth by a researcherthe
pulling movement resulting in her twin's ngers
being pulled out of her mouthshe strained
forward with her head in pursuit of the retreating
ngers, i.e., in pursuit of something alien to her
own body. In documenting two distinctively
dierent bodily movements, the experiment documents rst and foremost a strong and lively
bodily sense of self in the form of a resonant
kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic body, and in turn, the
possibility of volitional movement or self-agency,
and an awareness of self and non-self. In other
words, the ``control of sensory stimulae'' and ``an
awareness of something belonging to the outside''
are empirically grounded in kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic experience, dynamic experiences of one's
own body. From a psychoanalytic viewpoint, it

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Commentary on The Concept of the Self and the Self Representation

would indeed appear that Stern's conjecture
concerning volition``volition may be the most
fundamental invariant of core self-experience''
(Stern, 1985, pp. 7677)should be taken seriously. Self-agency has its origin in the experience
of self-movementwhat infant/child psychologist
Jerome Bruner terms ``agentivity'' (Bruner,
1990)and necessarily indicates a distinction
between self and other. To take Stern's conjecture
seriously, however, it is necessary to temper
adultist perspectives that look back theoretically
and speculatively on infancy, investigating and
consulting studies of infancy rst-hand and
constructing a developmental psychoanalytic
based on evidence that looks forward as well as
backward.
Received wisdom appears to look exclusively
backward in dictating a beginning non-dierentiation of self from other, a seless state that
blankets over all distinctions and that becomes
enlightened only in time, as Milrod indicates (e.g.,
pp. 49, 50). But received wisdom is in error.
Interestingly enough, Milrod conrms the error
when he writes that ``There cannot be an
awareness of something outside of the self without a simultaneous awareness of the self, in
whatever primitive form that takes'' (p. 17). To
support his conrmation from the viewpoint of a
newborn, one might consider the experience of
being pushed and squeezed in the process of birth;
of being handled for the rst time; and of sucking
not one's own thumb as in the womb (Furuhjelm,
Ingelman-Sundberg, and Wirsen, 1979), but of
sucking on the nipple of a breast, feeling a surge
of lukewarm uid in one's mouth, and swallowing
it. A state of non-dierentiation would indeed be
dicult to maintain in face of such singularly
early tactile-kinesthetic experiences. Milrod's
contrary armation that dierentiation is ``a
process that in time will clearly dierentiate
between self and non-self, inner and outer, self
and object'' and his claim that ``In the beginning,
these distinction are blurred, hazy, and transient''
(p. 16), is undermined on the empirical side not
only by Stern's experimental studies of fourmonth old infants and by reections on the
process of birth and the experiences of newborns,
but by psychologist Andrew Meltzo's studies of
newborns and infants.
Meltzo's intricately layered and epistemologically probing investigations of newborns and
infants oer conclusive evidence of a distinction
between self and other as well as a further
validation of self-agency and, in eect, a further
perspective on the primordial bodily ego. His
initial studies centered on the imitational abilities
of infants, beginning with their ability to imitate

59

the tongue protrusions, rounded mouth-openings,

and lip protrusions of an adult, and this as early
as forty-two minutes after birth (Meltzo and
Moore, 1983, 1977). These and other studies
validated the more complex abilities of newborns
and infants to delay their imitations (because a
pacier in their mouths prevented them from
immediately imitating an action) and to correct
their imitations (because they sensed their initial
imitations to be a less than perfect match). This
bodily capacity of newborns and infants to imitate
adult mouth gestures is undergirded by a resonant
and attuned kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic body, and
it is this body and its elemental movement
capacities that undergirds the imitative capacities
of which Milrod speaks. Moreover other studies
of Meltzo and colleagues show not only that
infants distinguish between self and other but that
they distinguish objects in their world. For
example, blindfolded three-week old infants who
were given either round- or knobby-nippled
paciers recognized visually the particular type
of pacier they had had in their mouths when
their blindfolds were removed (Meltzo and
Borton, 1979). Meltzo and colleagues also
performed studies showing that infants can match
not only what they see with what they have
previously felt tactilely and kinesthetically, but
can match what they see with what they hear, i.e.,
match articulatory gestures and sounds (Kuhl
and Meltzo, 1982).
In sum, empirical studies of infant competencies (see also Butterworth, 1983, 1993; Butterworth and Hopkins, 1988) demonstrate a clear
awareness of ``bodily sensations,'' so clear that
attributions of ``blurred, hazy, or transient''
awarenesses of self appear misguided. Such
attributions are reminiscent of Lacan's characterization of an infant as a corps morcele. It is of
interest to recall in this context that Lacan never
produced any case studies of infancy to support
his psychoanalytic of infancy and that his triing
conception of the body and correlative pedestalling of language (critically discussed in SheetsJohnstone, 1994) prevented him from seeing,
much less appreciating, how the ego is rst and
foremost a bodily ego. In fact, whether in the
form of blurred, hazy, or transient awarenesses or
of a corps morcele, a diminished or non-dierentiated self and a primordial bodily ego are
antithetical notions. A primordial bodily ego is
basically a kinetic/tactile-kinesthetic/aective ego
that is alive to itself and to the world from the
beginning. When the psychoanalytic concepts of
dierentiation and de-dierentiation are experientialized in terms of distress and gratication,
they implicitly arm the reality of this primordial

60
bodily ego over the reality of a non-dierentiated
or impoverished self. The experience of distress
and of gratication can in fact be utilized to esh
out the primordial bodily ego along phenomenological lines, lines that take us back to a concern
with origins and to an elucidation of experience.

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II
An experientially-tethered developmental psychoanalytic starts at the beginning in the sense of
recognizing that our rst task as newborns and
infants is to learn our bodies and to learn to move
ourselves (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999). What is it to
be a body, a fresh, newly-born one that is not
stillborn but moving? The psychoanalytic self
from this perspective is not just a bundle of
mental energies that are cathected and decathected but a lively bodily self that is attentive,
responsive, inquisitive, frustrated, hesitant, excited, explorative, and even venturesomeas well
as distressed and gratied. ``Mental energies'' are
thus aectively and tactile-kinesthetically charged
energies, which is to say they are dynamically felt
corporeal energies; they have a distinctive corporeal feel and kinetic ow. In Freud's terms, they
are ``bodily sensations.''
Distress and gratication are just such
``bodily sensations''not surface ones, but aectively and tactile-kinesthetically felt ones.
Although Stern does not identify them in this
way, he attempts to capture these aective/tactilekinesthetic ``sensations'' when he describes how
hunger moves through an infant's body, characterizing the experience as a ``hunger storm . . . that
passes'' (Stern, 1990, pp. 3135, 3643). Adults
would not likely say that hunger ``sweeps through
[their bodies] like a storm, disrupting whatever
was going on before and temporarily disorganizing [their] behavior''; nor would they likely notice
that their hunger ``establishes its own patterns of
action and feelings, its own rhythms'' (ibid., p. 32),
making them breathe faster, for example, and
more jaggedly. Yet however much adults might
marginalize or ignore the bodily dynamics of
hunger and the bodily dynamics of satiety, not in
the sense of not ``feeling hungry'' and ``feeling
full,'' but in the sense of not turning attention to
the actual dynamics constituting the experience of
such feelingsthe way feelings of hunger course
through their body, the way feelings of satisfaction spread through their bodythe bodily
dynamics of hunger and satiety, the dynamics of
bodily changes, are dramatically lived through
events for infants. In short, a corporeal dynamics
denes distress and gratication, just as it denes

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone
hesitancy, excitement, frustration, curiosity, exploration, and so on. It is just such corporeal
dynamics that undergird the ego that is rst and
foremost a bodily ego. In fact, it may well be the
qualitative character of these dynamics as they
are lived by any infant that substantively mark
the psychic character of its developing ego. In
other words, certain qualitative corporeal dynamics
can, through repetition, come to dominate
because that qualitative corporeal dynamics is
inscribed in the body. It is at this corporeal
juncturein a neuroscience of bodies rather than
a neuroscience of the brainthat the essential
crossroad that joins psychoanalysis and neuroscience might be delineated.
Provocatively enough, Milrod speaks briey
of this juncture when, in discussing certain
organismic features of Damasio's and Panksepp's
writings on the self, he parenthetically states
(p. 62), ``I believe we might usefully enlarge
Freud's dictum today to include the idea that the
self representation is rst and foremost a body
representation,'' and goes on to say, ``One
consequence of this would be an expansion of
our concepts . . .'' Before this inclusion and
conceptual expansion can be accomplished, however, certainly it is necessary rst to grasp the full
import of Freud's original observation by eshing
it out to its full stature. If the ego is rst and
foremost a bodily ego, and if the self and the self
representation are substructures of the ego, then
the rst requisite is to understand in the most
precise and fullest sense what it means to say that
the ego is rst and foremost a bodily ego, in
essence, to spell out how the kinetic/tactilekinesthetic/aective body is the foundation of
the ego. Surely work toward this understanding is
long overdue. Just as surely, its rewards should be
sizable. Surely too, this work would not only
validate the perspicuity of Freud's insight but be a
tribute to it.
References
Bruner, J. (1990), Acts of Meaning. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Butterworth, G. (1983), Structure of the mind in
human infancy. In: Advances in Infancy Research,
Vol. 2, ed. L. P. Lipsitt & C. K. Rovee-Collier.
Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing, pp. 129.
(1993), Dynamic approaches to infant perception
and action: old and new theories about the origins
of knowledge. In: A Dynamic Systems Approach to
Development: Applications, ed. Linda B. Smith & E.
Thelen. Cambridge: MIT Press/Bradford Books,
pp. 171187.
Butterworth, G., & Hopkins, B. (1988), Hand-mouth

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Response to Commentaries
coordination in the newborn baby. British Journal
of Developmental Psychology, 6: 303314.
Freud, S. (1955), The Ego and the Id, S.E., XIX, tr. J.
Strachey. London: Hogarth Press.
Furuhjelm, M., Ingelman-Sundberg, A., & Wirsen, C.
(1976), A Child Is Born. New York: Delacorte Press/
Seymour Lawrence.
Husserl, E. (1970), The Crisis of the European Sciences
and Transcendental Phenomenology, tr. D. Carr.
Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
(1973), Cartesian Meditations, tr. D. Cairns. The
Hague: Martinus Nijho.
(1980), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology
and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Book 3
(Ideas III), tr. T. E. Klein & W. E. Pohl. The
Hague: Martinus Nijho.
(1983), Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology
and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: Book 2
(Ideas II), tr. R. Rojcewicz & A. Schuwer. Boston:
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Kuhl, P. K., & Meltzo, A. N. (1984), The intermodal

61
representation of speech in infants. Infant Behavior
and Development, 7: 361381.
Meltzo, A. N., & Borton, R. W. (1979), Intermodal
matching by human neonates. Nature, 282(5737):
403404.
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Response to the Commentaries by David Milrod

I am very appreciative of the eort, time, and

serious thought each of the discussants have
contributed to what has now, because of them,
become a joint eort. Clearly, coming from
dierent disciplines, or diering schools within
the same discipline, misunderstandings and confusions are bound to arise. Some of these must
await further work before greater clarity and
approximation of understanding will be possible.
Some dierences simply have to be faced as basic
disagreements which time may not overcome.
Four of the commentaries come from psychoanalysts or analytically oriented workers, and
three from neuroscientists or psychoanalytically
oriented workers. I will rst discuss the psychoanalytically related commentaries, followed by
those of the neuroscientists. One of my reactions
to reading the psychoanalytic comments, was an
impulse to be drawn into a discussion of psychoanalytic theory, which I largely tried to resist, not
always successfully. In part I could not entirely
avoid it because of the nature of some of the
contributions.
I was puzzled about how to respond to Dr.
Goldberg's comments. His passionate antipathy
to ego psychology is well known, so that the
content of his contribution is not surprising. In
my paper I chose not to deal with other schools of
psychoanalytic theory because it would make the
undertaking too broad, too lengthy, and would

shift the focus away from the one I chose, namely

the sharing of psychoanalytic ideas with neuroscientists. Had it been my purpose to compare the
views of 2 or more schools of psychoanalytic
theory, the school of self psychology would have
been an obvious choice, especially because I was
examining the self and the self representation.
Despite Dr. Goldberg's conviction that ego
psychology has outlived its usefulness, I along
with many psychoanalysts do not agree with him,
and I count myself among the many who believe
that it remains the most versatile, all encompassing, theoretical school of psychoanalysis with the
most far reaching explanatory power for the
understanding of all psychic phenomena and
conditions that we study. It even has much to
contribute to each of the other theoretical
schools. For example, Dr. Goldberg's emphasis
on self/object transferences, a central concept in
self psychology, emerges from the theory of the
gradual development and maturation of the ego,
including gradual self/object dierentiation, described by ego psychologists. Implicit in this
theory is a period of time during which dierentiation is relatively incomplete, and distinctions
between self and object are only brief and
transitory, and therefore merging and confusion
between self and object are common. Self
psychology focuses on the transferences inuenced by this period of development, transfer-