Acoustic resonance at the dawn of life: musical fundamentals of the psychoanalytic relationship.

Abstract

This paper uses a case vignette to show how musical elements of speech are a crucial source of information regarding the patient's emotional states and associated memory systems that are activated at a given moment in the analytic field. There are specific psychoacoustic markers associated with different memory systems which indicate whether a patient is immersed in a state of creative intersubjective relatedness related to autobiographical memory, or has been triggered into a traumatic memory system. When a patient feels immersed in an atmosphere of intersubjective mutuality, dialogue features a rhythmical and tuneful form of speech featuring improvized reciprocal imitation, theme and variation. When the patient is catapulted into a traumatic memory system, speech becomes monotone and disjointed. Awareness of such acoustic features of the traumatic memory system helps to alert the analyst that such a shift has taken place informing appropriate responses and interventions. Communicative musicality (Malloch & Trevarthen 2009) originates in the earliest non-verbal vocal communication between infant and care-giver, states of primary intersubjectivity. Such musicality continues to be the primary vehicle for transmitting emotional meaning and for integrating right and left hemispheres. This enables communication that expresses emotional significance, personal value as well as conceptual reasoning.