The present study aims to investigate how physical therapy interns comprehend body concepts, body image and body schema and, with the data collected during this investigation, to enable a dialogue between such comprehensions and the psychoanalytical understanding of the same concepts in order to reflect upon the possibility of an interdisciplinary psychology-physical therapy intervention. Eight graduate students were interviewed, all in the final semester of their internship programs. A semi-structured interview was applied to these students, which sought to investigate the students’ understandings of the concepts discussed in this study. The analysis of the content obtained from the interviews and the dialogue established with psychoanalytical concepts have evidenced that the knowledge of future physical therapists concerning the concepts of body, body image and body schema may benefit from this study. Physical therapists will be able to better understand the psychological aspects present in patients’ symptomatic picture will also be able to help these professionals in successfully performing an intervention that takes the patients’ discourse into account.
Body image; Body schema; Physical therapy; Psychoanalysis
