Lemma examines how psychic pain can be expressed through the body, through elective procedures or somatic conditions brought on by psychological issues

Alessandra Lemma is Director of the Psychological Therapies Development Unit at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust. She is a Consultant Adult Psychotherapist at the Portman Clinic. She is also a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society, Visiting Professor in the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London and Honorary Professor of Psychological Therapies in the School of Health and Human Sciences at Essex University. She is the Clinical Director of the Psychological Interventions Research Centre at UCL, Visiting Professor at Istituto Winnicott, Sapienza University of Rome and Centro Winnicot, Rome. Professor Lemma is Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis book series (Routledge) and one of the regional editors for the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. She has published extensively on psychoanalysis, the body and trauma.

Campbell, Preface. Introduction When the Body Speaks. Envy and the Maternal Body: The Psychodynamics of Cosmetic Surgery. Whose Skin is it Anyway? Some Reflections on the Psychic Function of Necrophilic Fantasies. An Order of Pure Decision: Growing up in a Virtual World and the Adolescent's Experience of Being-in-a-Body. Present Without Past: The Disruption of Temporal Integration in a Case of Transsexuality. The Body One Has and the Body One is: The Transsexual's Need to be Seen. Trauma and the Body: A psychoanalytic Reading of Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In. The Body of the Analyst and the Analytic Setting: Reflections on the Embodied Setting and the Symbiotic Transference. Rapunzel Revisited: Untangling the Unconscious Meaning of Hair. Off the Couch, Into the Toilet: Exploring the Psychic Uses of the Analyst's Toilet. Entrepreneurs of the Self: Some Psychoanalytic Reflections on the Psychic and Social Functions of Reality TV Makeover Shows.