Content area
Full Text
Communication between patient and analyst is a two-way transaction. The communication may be verbal or nonverbal, conscious or unconscious. Our earliest mode of communication is through behaviors and sounds. In adult life this mode persists, so that our spoken communications may often be accompanied by unspoken messages. In the analytic situation, unspoken messages are an integral part of the communications from patient to analyst and analyst to patient. Examples are presented of spoken and unspoken communications, and their role in the psychoanalytic process is explained.
Communication is a two-way transaction. It requires a sender and a receiver. There are many ways of communicating. There are conscious messages and unconscious messages, sent verbally, nonverbally, or symbolically. Nonverbal messages occur continuously in myriad ways through behavior, body tone and position, gestures, facial expressions, tone and inflections of voice, choice of words, and more. The unspoken communication may carry an intentional message but, as with the spoken message, the listener may interpret it differently. The intentional communication is modified by the unspoken affective or cognitive accompanying message. If the unspoken message is unconscious, the listener may be aware of it while the sender is not, and this may lead to misunderstanding.
The Earliest Communications
Affective and unspoken communication antedates verbalization (Stern, 1985). A common type of unspoken message is contained in the patient's reports of somatic sensations or symptoms, body attitudes, postures, movements, respiration, in addition to different aspects of voice, such as rhythm, pitch, loudness, and voice quality. Freud (1923) first described the ego as a body ego derived from bodily sensations, particularly those of the body's surface.
In early infancy the mother and the baby communicate and know each other's thoughts and feelings through sounds and behavior. The infant communicates with the mother by the way he eats, by grimacing, smiling, kicking and moving the hands and feet, and crying. The cry may be a whimper, a moan, or a loud bellow. It may last for a moment, or it may go on for some time. Usually the attuned mother interprets and understands the message in the baby's communication and responds appropriately. The infant may be cold, wet and uncomfortable, hungry, sleepy, or in pain. If the baby is cold, the attuned mother covers...