Cephalic Shock as a Somatic Link to the False Self Personality
Dr. Robert Lewis, M.D.
Cephalic Shock as a Somatic Link to the False Self Personality
Original printing in 1983 Robert Lewis, M.D.
I . I N T R O DU CT I O N
In this paper I will compare, on both theoretical and practical levels, my concept of cephalic shock with Winnicott's concept of the False Self. I am suggesting that the integration of these two clinical constructs will help to explain why the mind is experienced as the locus of the False Self in some patients. This, in turn, should clarify the mind-body duality in the Bioenergetic and Reichian traditions (i.e., that there is a group of patients drawn to body-oriented therapies because the mind-body split from which they suffer, is a response to pre-verbal trauma). I will quote at some length from two papers by D.W. Winnicott, the pediatrician and child psychoanalyst and from an earlier paper of my own: I do this because I believe that although relevant material has been published on both sides of the mind-body dichotomy which exists within the field of psychotherapy, each side reads too parochially.
I I . D E F I N I T I O NS
A. CEPHALIC SHOCK A process by which a mind-body split is structured into the infant's body. In 1981, in a paper entitled "Cephalic Shock, a Psychosomatic Basis of Premature Ego development", I refer to people who feel that they were never carefree children, which they were old before they grew up, and who, as adults, rarely if ever, feel peaceful enough to stop thinking compulsively. (Lewis, 1981, p. 1) I believe I am describing here a frequent presentation of what Winnicott refers to as the False Self. The psychosomatic developmental hypothesis I offered in 1981, regarding the preverbal period was as follows: Cephalic shock develops when, in response to the ongoing experience of sufficiently unempathic parental holding and handling in the first months of life, the infant (of a parent with a borderline personality), sensing the faulty parental empathy, registers dissonance. Thrown back upon an immature nervous system, the infant will have to find a way to hold on, hold together, and hold against the parent, who cannot provide it with auxiliary ego (i.e. to fight gravity prematurely and unnaturally). The dissonant handling creates a chronic state of disequilibrium or shock. The infant braces as best it can against the shock. In the first weeks of life, the neuromuscular system of the head and neck is the most developed, the least helpless, and therefore must take the brunt of the shock. The head end is the part of the organism where the infant can best sustain a holding attitude against the dissonance it is experiencing. Since the voluntary muscular

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