Review of Psychic Threats and Somatic Shelters: Attuning to the Body in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Dialogue

Yarom’s (2015) book, Psychic Threats and Somatic Shelters: Attuning to the Body in Contemporary Psychoanalytic Dialogue, is her second publication with Routledge. Her first, Matrix of Hysteria (2005), also explores bodily manifestations in psychoanalysis, as part of her discussion of this historically-laden concept. This time, however, it seems to be Yarom’s aim to keep from restricting these manifestations to any diagnostic criteria or any single theory. Instead, she places them at the center of attention in the consulting room. The present book is a skillful interlacing of the body of knowledge and thought about the body in psychoanalytic theory but, most of all, it is a wellreasoned manifesto of the importance of body-attuned practice. The book consists of two parts. The first part, “Somatic Shelters,” contains eight chapters and serves as an anthology of bodily manifestations in the clinical setting. It describes different utilizations of what Yarom terms “somatic shelters:” ways of using the body when the mind fails, when one’s alpha function and/or relational context is inadequate. According to Yarom, being in a somatic shelter is a way to both avoid psychic experience and, at the same time, communicate its pain through the ‘coded’ language of physical phenomena or medical conditions. The first two chapters, “Subjects in Sight, Sound and Touch” and “Subjects in Smell and Taste,” demonstrate Yarom’s claim that all the senses are at work in the consulting room and that we should not dismiss any sensory input, however embarrassing, unpleasant or seemingly unimportant. Her claim is a kind of Freudian dictum