Somatic Experiencing: Enhancing Psychoanalytic Holding for Trauma and Catastrophic Dissociation–Contending with the Flood and the Fog

David Levit, PhD, ABPP, SEP, speaks about interweaving principles and approaches from a somatically based trauma therapy, Somatic Experiencing (SE), into psychoanalytic treatment. He focuses on patients with severe early traumas who are chronically vulnerable to states of catastrophic dissociative dissolution. When dissociation takes this form, not merely compartmentalization, but “dis-mentalization,” the mind and body are bombarded by overwhelming and disorganizing fragments of disturbing physical sensations, calamitous affects, disconnected and malevolent flashback echoes and images, and autonomic flooding and freezing. It is a terrible dilemma in treatment when patients are so swept up in the flood and/or lost in the fog, that there is no self who is present enough to hear, take in, and participate in the desperately needed holding and containment that we offer. Levit illustrates somatically based interventions that help contend with such catastrophic dissociative states. He also shows how these somatic interventions, borrowed from non-psychoanalytic trauma treatments, can enfold into our psychoanalytic modes of therapeutic process and therapeutic action.