The BODY-A Theoretical and Clinical Continuum

The lectureship day features Dr. Anne Alvarez (UK), Carla Weber (Germany), Dr. Iftah Biran (Israel), Orly Hasson Katz (Israel)

Dr. Iftah Biran (Israel): The Wandering Womb, Free Energy and

Predictive Coding: Clinical Metaphors of Bodily Movement and

Psychic Binding

The ancient metaphor of the “Wandering Womb“, once invoked to explain hysteria, continues to resonate in modern clinical practice. Though anatomically obsolete, it captures subjective experiences of unbound free energy—uncertainty, unpleasure, conflictual sexual phantasies and psychic disorganization—manifesting as bodily symptoms. Drawing on Freud’s economic model and predictive coding theory, this lecture reinterprets the metaphor as a language for somatic imagination and conflict. Clinical vignettes illustrate how patients describe internal movements, fixations, and displacements, where the body becomes the stage for binding or releasing disruptive excitation. In the spirit of predictive coding, the metaphor of the wandering womb can be imagined as a compromise formation born of the ceaseless interplay between multilayered top-down predictions and the bottom-up currents of the external and internal (visceral and psychic) worlds. The “Wandering Womb” thus bridges historical imagination with contemporary models of mind–body dynamics in general and the predictive coding theory in particular.

Case Presentation: Carla Weber (Germany)

This clinical presentation traces the analytic process of an eight-year-old boy in his search for a psychic space where he can discover, inhabit, and experience his body as his own. His oscillations between somatic expression, withdrawal, and emerging symbolic gestures reflect a fragile, gradually forming sense of self.

For more details and registration .