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II. B. The “Over-Adapted Patient” This concept represents an extension and later elaboration of Liberman’s early interest in psychosomatic incidence, as originally exemplified in his doctoral thesis on Psychosomatic Semiology (1947). In his return to this subject (Liberman, 1982), organic traits are not the core of psychosomatic characterisation, but rather overadaptation to the environment and to unquestioned dominant cultural values. The ‘overadapted’ person adapts to reality in a passive, noncritical way. The substantial consequence of this environmental ‘overadaptation’ is the deferral/suspension and underestimation of the corporeal and emotional self, hence the Liberman’s formula of “ overadapted environmental self ” versus “ repudiated and subjugated body self ”. Signals coming from the emotional world and the world of the body are ignored due to faulty symbol construction by a deficient symbolic apparatus. When the body’s stimuli are not integrated in the psychical process, the mind suffers from a deficit the result of which is the pre-eminence of exteriority over interiority . Conceptual connections with Sándor Ferenczi’s (1931, 1949) traumatized ‘wise baby’ and Donald Winnicott’s (1955) ‘false self’, developing under the conditions of ‘not good enough mothering’ are discernible. As mentioned at the start, the necessity to resort to those so-called auxiliary disciplines was the result of a methodological decision in line with his project to provide psychoanalysis with a greater scientific basis; as a result, it was necessary for Liberman to establish a specific empirical base for psychoanalysis. To view the analytic session as a dialogue framed within human interaction demanded that the study of the unconscious in the session itself was differentiated from the study of the session from the outside, in which case the performance of both members of the dyad, as well as the responsibility of each of them in the therapeutic or iatrogenic outcome of the process, should be evaluated with the least possible subjectivity. Within the session it is impossible, besides being inadvisable, to detach from one’s own subjectivity, since both members are necessarily immersed in the emotional atmosphere of the transference-countertransference. The case is different when the session is examined from the outside. In order to obtain such objectivity, he insisted upon the need to count for this examination on the so-called “auxiliary disciplines”. It is noteworthy that Liberman did not substitute a new psychopathology for the classical one: his contribution promoted an original “systematization of psychoanalytic clinical work” starting from the specificity of his method. That was the result of the above-mentioned methodological decision. Liberman’s viewing psychoanalytic therapy as a dialogue implies taking for granted from the very start a “linking” perspective framed in the repeatedly mentioned human interaction, as exemplified by his statement “… the psychoanalytic session is understood as an interactive process in which the behavior of one of the members of the [analytic] couple determines the response of the other, and vice versa…” (Liberman, 1976, p. 21). Liberman’s analytic dialogue, based on the postulates of the Theory of Communication, can be seen as an
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