'Why is This Happening in My Body'?: the meeting of/between patients' imaginings and analysts' theories with Sharone Bergner, PhD (New York)

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Jul 13, 2025

Sharone Bergner, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst from New York, delves into the intricate ties between physical health and psychological well-being. She discusses how patients' childhood imaginings can surface during illness, providing both comfort and confusion. Examining real cases of cancer, Sharone highlights how psychogenic beliefs can hinder medical treatment. The conversation emphasizes the need for empathy in understanding the mind-body connection, advocating for a holistic approach to patient care amid the complexities of human vulnerability.

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INSIGHT

Mindset Collapses Analytic Space

Analysts often bring their usual psychogenic decoding to bodily symptoms, treating them like other symptoms to be traced back to past conflicts.
This mindset can collapse the analytic space and prematurely assume causal knowledge about a patient's physical illness.

ADVICE

Don't Validate Etiology As Fact

Avoid accepting a patient's manifest psychogenic theory as factual etiology; instead explore its function in their inner world.
Keep the analytic atmosphere open rather than colluding with the patient's certainty about cause.

INSIGHT

Psychosomatic Is Not All Somatic

Winnicott's distinction separates ordinary somatic expressions from true psychosomatic disorders involving dissociation or defensive splits.
We should be more precise and less over-inclusive when labeling conditions psychosomatic.

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“I really think that the purpose is to make space for the unknown, uncertainty, and for our kind of humility in the face of the complexity of our belonging to the physical world. So it's our animality, our physicality, all of that is so complicated and difficult to grapple with. The unknown is uncontrollable and is a huge abyss, as we know, for everybody. I do think that I'm trying to pivot here a little bit towards meeting the patient's attempts to grapple with that unknown.”

Episode description: We begin by examining the assumptions of causality that we humans commonly invoke when faced with physical ailments. Childhood imaginings come forward during such times, and, despite being distressing, they offer comfort in the face of frightening uncertainty. Similarly, analytic theorizing has occasionally suggested certainties in the face of the unknown. This may limit the analytic space, thereby making vulnerability, fears, and new awarenesses less accessible. Sharone presents clinical material from patients with testicular cancer and lymphoma, where their psychogenic theories of etiology interfered with their medical care. We consider the distinction between patients with somatic symptoms and psychosomatic patients. We question the ability of the analytic method to uncover the origins of medical illnesses while emphasizing the importance of recognizing the "particular possibilities of our method."

Our Guest: Sharone Bergner Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in full time private practice of psychoanalysis, psychotherapy and clinical supervision in New York City. She is a member and former faculty at the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and is Adjunct Assistant Clinical Professor and a clinical supervisor at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, in the Contemporary Freudian track, where she teaches a course called The Body in Analytic Reverie. She is a member of the International Psychoanalytic Association and the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly. She has a special interest in the body/mind in relation to maternal reverie in early development, vitality, embodiment, and medical issues, having worked early in her career in a cancer hospital, with the internal medicine, OBGYN, and dermatology clinics of a large urban teaching hospital, with political refugees and with parent-child pairs.