Intersubjectivity and psychopathology: Borderline and psychosomatic bodies “at the mind’s limits”

The body is the essential go-between between selfhood and otherness, and the site of the implicit traces of intersubjectivity that have marked the brain as well as the body. The body is also the depository of epigenetically implicit traces, sorts of implicit working models. The body is finally the site of the un/conscious, in the sense of implicit memory, something that is not conscious but guides implicitly, namely without our full awareness, behaviors, motivations, feelings, and responses. In psychopathology, only interpersonal traumatizations or “trauma of human agency” in its three levels causes dissociation in humans. At the mind’s limits, the body/mind disconnection that characterizes psychopathology, as in borderline personality disorders, is also evident in psychosomatic disorders, where the circuit between what the body feels, what the mind registers, and what the subject can name or is able to express verbally is disconnected and, as a result, bodily symptoms come forth in order to name the emotional pain. While hysterical symptoms still retain a symbolic root suitable for interpretation (retaining a metaphoric link between mind and body), psychomatic disorders show that the connection between body and mind has been severed and the symptoms speak “at the mind’s limits.”.