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The Essence of Somatic Experiencing and Its Contribution to Psychoanalytic Treatment: Reply to Jody Davies and Elizabeth Howell

ABSTRACT I appreciate Elizabeth Howell’s creative ways of re-articulating and engaging with my work with Ellie, and I respond here to her elaboration of her own generative thinking in terms of dissociation and DID. In dialogue with Jody Davies, I reply to her critique in terms of my view that she overly privileges the capital E enactment model in relation to other aspects of psychoanalytic process. However, that debate is not what is most central for me here. Regardless of how Davies, or you, the reader, might regard my own particular ways of engaging in the treatment with Ellie, the raison d’etre for my current paper (as well as an earlier one also on Somatic Experiencing is much more wide ranging. While I have described the SE model and illustrated how I interweave it into my psychoanalytic work, I seek more broadly to convey how we may draw upon SE to enhance aspects of our psychoanalytic work, regardless of our theoretical allegiances or beliefs. I elaborate here on SE’s organic, bottom-up ways of working with the body, how these truly differ from modes utilized by most analysts, and how SE can enfold into psychoanalytic treatment in both exploratory and regulatory processes, and in the therapeutic relationship. Howell’s discussion and Davies’ discussion/critique were quite generative in pushing me to clarify and deepen my thinking and to elaborate further here on the essence of Somatic Experiencing and what it has to offer to psychoanalytic treatment.