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of conflicts, compromise formations and unconscious fantasies (Brenner 1982, A. Kris 1988), have clinical implications in analytic work with widened scope of patient populations, where there is an acknowledgement of different paths to facilitate developmental transformation. Clinical interventions which can facilitate the dormant transformative capacity (Lament 2003, Olesker and Lament 2008), acting as a new platform for further growth (Olesker 2011) and may include analytic construction (Freud 1937) and reconstruction of meaning of the memories, leading to reorganization that encompasses multiple self and object representations (Blum 1994, 2019). On a session-to-session minute-to-minute basis, such constructive and reconstructive work may necessitate ‘rolling’ metaphoric interpretative translations- transformations , between, and of, different experiential domains , from pre-psychic pre- symbolic (action, somatosensory, visceral) modes of experience towards unconscious symbolism of dreams and finally preconscious symbolism of language (Papiasvili 2016), and may constitute a meeting point with some of Wilfred Bion’s as well as André Green’s conceptualizations of transformation (Grotstein 2014, Green 2006). III. Bcb. Central Ego Concept: A Body Ego And Related Concepts Freud centrally stated, “…The ego is first and foremost a bodily ego . It is not merely a surface entity, but is in itself a projection of a surface.” (Freud, 1923a, p. 26). He believed that the primordial roots of mental structures are to be found in the infant’s body sensations and feelings, importantly those internally registered, as well as external. In the pre- 1960s and early 1970s, the body ego was explored clinically in relation to pain, orgasm, castration anxiety, or symptoms such as depersonalization. Wilhelm Reich (1933) wrote of ego defenses as character patterned “ body armor ”. Psychosomatic studies by Franz Alexander (1965) and others explored the effects of the emotions on bodily illness. Mental representations of body parts, images, fantasies and sensations were refined in relation to the ego, the self and objects by Jacobson (1964). Conceptualizations emerging out of developmental psychoanalytic research and mother-infant studies of the 1970’s – 2000’s (e.g., Mahler, Pine and Bergmann 1975, Stern 1985, Beebe and Lachmann 2002, Tronick 2002), in continuity with explorations of the early ego under various environmental conditions (Spitz 1950, Bowlby 1958, Winnicott 1971), sustained bodily interests. A psychoanalytic study of touch presents a specific example of a further development of the body ego concept within the North American Contemporary Freudian thought - the broadest strand of contemporary development within Structural theory/Ego Psychology, which synthesizes pertinent inputs from various psychoanalytic cultures together with interdisciplinary findings. Touch is a primordial endowment, one of the two sensory-motor systems evident in utero. The fetal skin is touching the surrounding fluid; the fetus sucks its thumb, and during the course of the last trimester touches its body with its hands, progressing over time from head to
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