I feel therefore We are: The body as an emotional map of the world in the interplay between individual and collective psyche.

This chapter proposes the idea that between the individual human body and the collective psychic life there is a special and mysterious unmediated relationship. This observation stems from clinical experience of the importance of the body in analytic therapies of people who have survived political violence, such as torture and other human rights violations. Not only violent collective action, but also peaceful political life uses the body as a vehicle for its representations and to manage its changes. This chapter attempts to develop an understanding of this phenomenon through the concept of states of oneness as a primordial state of mind that generates first undifferentiated forms of existence, individual and collective. It refers to an extension of what Jung called participation mystique to name a state of unconscious identity between the psyche of the individual and an object or another subject. This expression applies to all cases, where the subject is bound in relationship of partial identity. A state of oneness extends this idea to the group psyche and includes the possibility of a direct hold of group psyche on people's bodies, creating states of the mind that constitute a sense of collective ‘We-ness’. The bodies of victims of human rights violations and political violence end up becoming shared bodies. The meaning of their suffering, both physical and psychological, reflects the psychic life of the group. In this sense, they can rightly say: “I feel, therefore We are.”