The Book

This book considers, from a psychoanalytic perspective, why people pierce, tattoo, cosmetically enhance or otherwise modify their body, discussing how the therapist can understand and help individuals who feel body modification is necessary.

"It is high time for clinicians to recognise that the body matters. This book is a brilliant illustration of how psychoanalytic therapy can illuminate our struggles with the physicality of our being and suggests effective solutions for the clinical management of these. With this book, Alessandra Lemma has established herself as one of the most original and creative contributors to psychoanalytic psychotherapy. The book is replete with arresting clinical insights and provides innovative theoretical integration that the field concerned with the mind in the body has lacked for a generation." - Peter Fonagy, Freud Memorial Professor of Psychoanalysis, University College London

"Beautifully written, this book is easily approachable by a large spectrum of readers while also addressing some deeply psychoanalytic and clinical issues. By discussing specific unconscious phantasies and the hatred of reality at work in the compelling need to modify the surface of the body, the book introduces an important psychoanalytic perspective on the complex and delicate role of early maternal responsiveness in development." - Dana Birksted-Breen, Training Psychoanalyst; Joint Editor-in-Chief International Journal of Psychoanalysis

The Speaker

Prof. Alessandra Lemma is the Trust-wide Head of Psychology at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust and a psychoanalyst. She is Visiting Professor in Psychological Therapies in the School of Health and Human Sciences at Essex University. She is a Senior Member of the British Association of Psychotherapists, a Member of the British Psychoanalytical Society, and Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society. She is the Editor of the Journal of the Association for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy in the NHS, and the Assistant Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis book series. She has published several books and papers on psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, the body and trauma.