Di seguito pubblico l'introduzione e le conclusioni del mio intervento fatto a Küsnacht (Zurigo) durante la conferenza per celebrare i 75 anni dalla fondazione del Carl Gustav Jung Institut. Il testo completo è pubblicato da Routledge (London & New York 2025).

Introduction^[i]

In the Sandplay Therapy research and experience group^[ii] founded and led by Martin Kalff in 2007 in Zollikon, Zürich, I was able to experience the importance of bodily sensations in my relationship with my psyche and with my patients. Through this experience, I felt that psyche and soma tend to coincide and a relational field is created right where the archetypal potentials of the therapist-patient couple are activated. This discovery allowed me to approach in an imaginative way the subject of the subtle body or somatic unconscious^[iii] that Jung talks about in his writings on Alchemy and in the Seminars on Nietzsche.

The new approach proposed by Martin Kalff has been enriched by constant and creative confrontation with the Zollikon group formed by Italian therapists.^[iv] Taking up the method devised by his mother Dora,^[v] Martin puts new emphasis on the importance of becoming aware of sensations and feelings and invites us to always turn our attention to the “felt body”.

I would like to mention in this collection celebrating 75 years since the founding of the Carl Gustav Jung Institute, that it was here that Dora Kalff studied from 1949 to 1953. Her talent in working with children had been noticed by her analyst, Emma Jung, as well as by C.G. Jung himself, and both suggested she should study Margaret Lowenfeld’s World Technique in order to develop an approach according to analytical psychology.

I would also like to express my gratitude to Martin Kalff, Dora’s son, a true master for me, with whom I have had a collaborative relationship and deep friendship for years.

Notes

^[i] I would like to thank Silvia Lazzaroni for her careful revision of the text and Martin Kalff for his valuable comments and suggestions.

^[ii] “Zollikon Experience-Related Sandplay Study Group” also referred to as “Zollikon Group”. 

^[iii] In this paper, following Jung's lectio I mainly use the locution subtle body, but the two definitions (subtle body and somatic unconscious) should be thought of together because they describe a single process: the body tends to become unconscious and the unconscious tends to become soma.

^[iv] For an exposition of the method and work of the Zollikon Group see: M. Kalff, Old and New Horizons of Sandplay Therapy. Mindfulness and Neural Integration edited by Paolo Ferliga, Routledge, London and New York, 2022.

^[v] D. Kalff, Sandplay, a Psychotherapeutic Approach to the Psyche, Analytical Psychology Press, Sandplay Editions, Oberlin, OH, 2020.

Conclusion

In this way therapists can develop their body consciousness and can achieve that “no-memory, no-desire” situation dear to Wilfred Bion. They can also abandon those preconceptions and projections, that make an intimate relationship with the patient's experiences impossible, and can learn to be in the “here and now” of bodily experience. The echo of movement resonating in different parts of the body activates different feelings and emotions ranging from vitality and joy to exhaustion and blockage. Paradoxically, this kind of attention to the body tends to ‘de-realize’ it and foster the emergence of deep, archetypal aspects of the psyche. We are thus in the realm of the subtle body/somatic unconscious, where communication between members of the supervision group seems to take place at the same time on a physical and psychic plane. Perhaps it is precisely the experience of the subtle body, that enables the therapist to contact emotions and experiences the patient is not yet able to reach personally.

   Certainly, the subtle body hypothesis does not give us a definitive answer to the problem of the psyche-body relationship. Its analogy with emotions, however, allows us to use it as a boundary idea to activate imagination and fantasy, both indispensable tools for confronting the deeper, archetypal aspects of the psyche and the body.

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