I came across this piece on body image by EYNEL WARDI in:
�Connotations 9.2 (1999-2000): pp. 190-209. The article was entitled: "A Boy in the Listening: On Voice, Space, and Rebirth in the Poetry of Dylan Thomas."
I find as a man I get little sense of who I am by my body image but I know my wife does and I place this item here for all those for whom body image and identity is crucial.
________________________________...the language is a little difficult...
The psychoanalytic literature that reflects on the formative role of the early "aerial" experiences in the emergence of the subject as an embodied speaking being throws light on the significance of the concrete images of re-birth in Thomas's poem in terms of the conjunction of body and language which they configure. In their attempt to imagine the development of the infant's basic sense of itself as a more or less unified being, authors like Fran�oise Dolto, Didi�r Anzieu and Dominique Ducard imagine the evolution of a primary "body image" through the imaginative elaboration of respiratory, olfactory and notably auditory experiences of the "aerial" environment. In this context, and often guided by the belief that "the sonic space is the first psychic space,"15 these authors postulate primordial acoustic or "sonic spaces," which yield a body image that precedes the scopic, specular image of the "unified body" or the rudimentary self formed, according to Lacan and Winnicott respectively, during the "mirror phase" or the period of the maternal "mirroring function."16
This basic body image and the sonic environment of which it is an elaboration are described by the psychoanalytic authors in terms of the dual function of accommodating space and delineating form--a duality that brings to mind the simultaneously metonymical and metaphorical birdlike image of the poet "on his Birthday" and accounts, perhaps, for the spatial experience of subjective ontology which it reflects. The body image is, thus, both "the palpable place where the subject can maintain [page 206] [tenir] his self, or alternatively, his body," and "a form where the subject can represent and articulate himself:17 "here I am."18 Succeeding a postulated primordial "foetal image,"19 the acoustic image is maintained within the fluid aerial space--a fluidity which recalls the water-air pair in Thomas's "Poem in October"--of a "sonic placenta" ("placenta sonore")20 and "sonic bath" ("bain sonor").21 The function of these is to contain or provide a "holding environment"22 for the infant so that the evolution of his body image and sense of wholeness may take place as it were "in the listening [. . .]." At the same time, however, the early acoustic spaces also introduce the infant with a sense of form that guarantees the formation of his/her identity through an eventual entry into the symbolic order of language. The primal body image is a structured auditory space, organized prosodically and melodically by the inscriptions of the body's rhythms as well as by speech intonations and rhythmic patterns that form an acoustic Gestalt.23 Thus, the elaboration of the basic body image is founded not only on unmediated perceptions and other somatic functions, but also on semiotic representations of inter-subjective relationships. In other words, the primary acoustic space is not merely an aerial reproduction of the nostalgic, autistic comfort of the womb, but is also a relational space where "the image of the body refers the subject of desire to his pleasure, mediated by the remembered language of the communication between subjects."24 The relational, form-giving aspect of the primary acoustic environment is configured in the notion of a "sonic mirror,"25 which alludes to Lacan's analogous notion of the foundation of the infant's sense of the unity of his body in the "mirror phase." Even as Lacan's scopic mirror reflects the body's imaginary wholeness by identificatory adherence to the "gaze of the Other," so the (chronologically prior) acoustic mirror embodies a recognition, by way of attribution, of an "other" as the source of its form-giving voice ("la voix-source").26 (The abstracted origin of that originary voice finds its configuration in numerous myths of creation by song, breath and speech, including, of course, the biblical myth to which Thomas alludes in his sacramental invocation of the "said" world.)
By providing at once a sense of containing plenitude and of other-related form, the early acoustic space imagined by psychoanalysts constitutes, [page 207] in its heterogeneity, a conjunction of the biological and the semiological origins of the subject's identifying embodiment. This site is not unlike Thomas's in "Poem in October," where water and name converge in the fluid space of natural and codified sounds to generate a signifying subject "in the listening"(also) to an other. In this view, the experience of the "boy in the listening" is a reenactment of the archaic genesis of the speaking subject through entrance into the order of language--by listening to a voice that at once restores, in its materiality, the archaic unity of the "water" and designates its loss--by "flying its name."
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