People often have resistance to exercising; one feels lazy, passive, lethargic; does not wish to make the effort. It is as if the body does not belong to the self; does not wish to "participate" in the efforts of the self; wishes to resist the self’s will. 

I hypothesize that part of this resistance may be understood as the result of the presence of objects experienced as psychosomatic entities.  Exercise is a struggle because internalized objects exist within specific body parts; are "fused" with these body parts, thus acting as an oppressive force or "counter-will" resisting activation of these bodily parts.

"Character armor" has a bodily meaning.  The body possesses a diminished "will to act" precisely because it experiences certain internal objects as fused with the self. These psychosomatically experienced objects function to provide structure; to "hold the self together." However, they also are a sedimentation or precipitate of the idea of the "other" within the self and therefore may be experienced as alien; as "weights of oppression."

The internalized object possesses its own will, as if acting autonomously from within the subject. Body-building, therefore, as a form of stimulating, activating, and strengthening the musculature is a way of waking up body parts and bringing them under the control of the self. 

One confronts the body part, asks it to pay attention, to gain its own strength--making it capable of ejecting psychosomatically experienced internal objects. The effort is made to connect the will of the subject with the body part, to gain the capacity to control that body-part and therefore to free the body part from the oppressive presence of the internal object.

Internalized objects may be experienced as forces or pressures within the self and musculature. When we speak of psychosomatic disease, we are suggesting that mental structures often produce a pain or discomfort equivalent to a physical disease.
 
I hypothesize that alien or malignant internal objects often are experienced as intruders or "foreign bodies" within the self, giving rise to the wish to "eject" these structures from within the self.

Psychosomatic reactions, therefore, are analogous to the "immune response," where the body experiences an object within its boundaries as "alien" and therefore acts to "eject" the object from within the self.
 
But the object that causes pain and which one wishes to eject from within the boundaries of the self is also a beloved object, the internalized mother (or another family member) that has been incorporated into the self.  When we speak of a primitive or archaic internalizations, we are suggesting that certain objects are firmly entrenched or embedded within the ego. Since "the ego is first and foremost a body ego," these objects are experienced as if within the body.  

It is as if the object "lives" within the self and therefore does not wish to be ejected; does not wish to be separated from the subject. Dialectically, the subject does not wish to lose the object, since this object represents or symbolizes a beloved human being--who has become perpetuated as an organic part of the self.

To liberate the body, then, is to free the body from internal objects, experienced as if embedded within the musculature; objects that which "attach" to the subject and thwart its active will.  "Self-control" means the capacity to control one’s own body; bring the body under the domain of the self and its will.

The psychosomatically afflicted body part is oppressed by the internalized object, causing that part of the body to feel weak or passive.  Body-building exercises stimulate this body part, creating a connection between the subjective will and that body part, therebye diminishing the passive attachment of that body part to the internalized object.