As already indicated in Sections 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.2.1 and 1.2.3 above, Schilder’s (1935/1978) work has been referred to as central to a psychoanalytic understanding of the body image. Tiemersma (1989) attributed this centrality to Schilder’s transformation of Head’s neurological idea into a psycho-physiological dynamic and entity, based upon his acknowledgement of Freud’s analyses of the role of psychological forces underlying physical symptoms. Thus Schilder extended Freud’s description of the bodily ego through the notion of dynamic construction.
Schilder (1935/1978) looked to psychoanalytic ideas as a means by which to understand why some perceptual experience slips into the background of consciousness beyond awareness,
while it may be simultaneously integrated into the central nervous system. His theory spells out the physiological and psychological relationships he suspected were involved in the integration and transformation of perception, the organization and development of apperception, and the relative permanence that the sense of bodilyness, provided by the body image, proffers human psychology. Schilder was deeply interested in the relationship between body and mind, and this was influenced by his studies in both neurology and psychoanalysis. As a result, his theory reflects the influence of each of these disciplines, but differs from each of them because his focus was an organic-cum-psychic activity, dynamic construction, that permitted him to think about change in the central nervous system and subjective experience as one singular event.
Schilder (1935/1978) identified Freud’s work as being invaluable to his understanding of human psychology, but differentiated his perspective from that of Freud on one significant point relating to the predominance given to the death instinct (or death drive) in Freud’s later writings. Schilder (1935/1978) wrote:
I do not think that Freud’s basic attitude that our desires lead us back to a state of rest is a true description of inner and outer experiences. I insist upon the constructive character of the psychic forces and refuse to make the idea of regression the centre of a theory of human behaviour. It seems to me, also that Freud has been inclined to neglect the principles of emergent evolution, or, as I would prefer to say, of constructive evolution, which leads to the creation of new units and configurations. (p. 9)
Schilder did not ignore the presence of destructive tendencies. For example, he emphasized their effect, especially through anxiety, on the felt cohesion of the body image, but he did not place the death instinct at the centre of his inquiry. Arguably, Schilder’s focus on dynamic construction indicated his interest in the systemic nature of the central nervous system to build functional patterns unique to the experience of each person, and how that constructive activity could be observed in the body of the patient, as well as in their psychological structure. His theory of dynamic construction is thus very like what Freud (1920/1986) identified as the life instinct or Eros.
Freud (1920/1986) first described the life instinct in Beyond the pleasure principle. His description derived from a biological metaphor of the nature of life at a cellular level. However, the description he composed closer to his own death identified the life instinct with the mythological
entity referred to as Eros or love, and transformed it into a psychological activity associated with the binding and unifying of sensory experience or, what in psychoanalytic terms is referred to as the libido. Freud (1940/1986) presented Eros as one half of a dichotomous pair, contrasting it with what has since been translated as the death drive. He wrote:
After long hesitancies and vacillations we have decided to assume the existence of only two basic instincts, Eros and the destructive instinct … The aim of the first is to establish ever greater unities and to preserve them thus – in short, to bind together; the aim of the second is, on the contrary, to undo connections and so to destroy things. (p. 379)
This characterization of the life instinct, or Eros, compares favorably with the activity Schilder (1935/1978) called dynamic construction. Schilder’s dynamic construction, however, is conceptually located at a more immediate point in the frontier between self and other, and is recognizable in the domain of perception through the notion of apperception. Rather than highlight the psychic representatives associated with apperception, as Freud (1940/1086) did in setting his neurological studies aside, Schilder’s dynamic construction reasserted a dual interest in the body as both a neurological entity and subjective, psychic experience. Schilder’s body image is an ongoing process of construction that crosses three dimensions of experience. It is also a theory of dynamic change in the systemic activity of the body, in the context of ill health and everyday life.
Where Freud described the nature of the bodily ego and directed his attention to “the kernel of the psyche” (Anzieu, 1989, p. 90), the concept of the body image has been a more peripheral phenomenon in psychoanalytic theory as it has been elaborated over time. In development, it serves a function in establishing a basis upon which the capacity for self-perception (the ego) is established. It has been viewed as largely unconscious, but as persisting over time as both a structure and a dynamic.
The psychoanalytic body image has a direct relationship to the development of human psychology. The psychosexual stages involve age-specific challenges associated with social expectations linking with the libidinous structure. The body image is the representation required for thinking subjectively on bodily existence. It commemorates conscious and unconscious experience and provides the continuity and stability of what we know to be our own existence.
The body image is a peripheral structure in psychoanalytic theory, but is essential in an implied way because it represents the body we come to understand as our own.