Stephen Porges on Polyvagal Theory, Psychoanalysis, and Body-Based Work

Eric asked Dr. Porges how Polyvagal Theory sits next to the older psychoanalytic frameworks, the ones built around childhood stages of development that stay mostly at the level of concept. Porges said you can line them up if you want to. The Id, in that language, points toward very old physiological systems. You could even sketch out Polyvagal stages that would map onto the psychoanalytic ones, though once you reach the idea of an integrated self you need the later part of Polyvagal Theory to account for it. So the mapping holds up to a point, and then you can pull it apart.

He recalled the old teaching shorthand: the Id was the horse, the ego the rider, the super-ego the path. People are talking in psychoanalytic terms again, in their own ways, and Porges sees something useful in that return. These are attempts to describe a system that interacts with itself rather than a set of fixed parts.

What Porges described is essentially a second swing of the pendulum. Biological psychiatry rose up as a reaction against psychoanalytic theory, and it carried a deterministic streak: find the right drug, adjust the chemistry, and the problem resolves. Now there's a reaction against that view, one that insists the system is more tangled than a single lever. Polyvagal Theory sits in that second reaction. It describes systems nested inside systems, the body shaping the brain and the brain shaping the body, with physiological state tinting how a person reads the world around them. Psychoanalytic theory, in its effort to handle a complicated interactive model, shares some of that character.

Eric brought up an earlier exchange between the two of them about body workers and things people might try at home, and asked how the theory applies to that kind of practice. Porges pointed out that it reaches well past body workers in the narrow sense. Several schools of body psychotherapy exist. Plenty of practitioners now fold touch and physical manipulation into talk therapy as an added channel.

Much of this connects to a distinction that is widely accepted at this point: the difference between kinds of memory. Some memories are implicit, held in the body, and we lack a good vocabulary for them. Others are explicit, the ones we can turn into a story and put into words.