Communicating Without Words in Psychotherapy … and Why We Can’t Talk About It

ABSTRACT

Cross-disciplinary findings affirm that a continuous flow of un-worded communication occurs between humans. Therapists and patients are no exception. In fact, when un-worded communication is synchronized between them, ratings of alliance and empathy rise and drop-out from therapy lowers. Psychoanalysis has shied from taking this aspect of communication and intervention seriously enough to devote consistent training and research resources to it. Fears of the unknown, fears of emotional intimacy, and being unwittingly caught up in a centuries-long cultural push to replace the primacy of right-hemispheric processing with left-hemispheric processing are contributing factors.

KEYWORDS:

• Psychotherapy
• psychoanalysis
• nonverbal communication
• synchrony
• unconscious communication
• training

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ As adapted from Peebles’ article “Longing and fear: The ambivalence about having a relationship in psychotherapy” (2019, pp. 141–142):Emotional distancing was part of Freud’s personality. To wit, Freud (1913) said: “I cannot put up with being stared at by other people for eight hours a day (or more)” (p. 134). Freud tended to distance himself from spontaneous emotions that arose in therapy by first universally pathologizing them; i.e., explaining them as symptoms of neuroses – the patient’s or the therapist’s. Second, he split off passionate stirrings and located them in the opposite gender from his own (arguably to make it more safely a not-me). Once in the opposite gender, he unconsciously belittled the feelings. For example, follow his language choices when he wrote about “transference love” (Freud, 1915):[A] woman patient shows by unmistakable indications, or openly declares, that she has fallen in love, as any other mortal woman might, with the doctor who is analyzing her. This situation has its distressing and comical aspects, as well as its serious ones … . No doctor who experiences this for the first time will find it easy to retain his grasp on the analytic situation … the experiment of letting oneself go a little way in tender feelings for the patient is not altogether without danger … . There is one class of women … women of elemental passionateness who tolerate no surrogates. They are children of nature who refuse to accept the psychical in place of the material, who, in the poet‘s words, are accessible only to “the logic of soup, with dumplings for arguments.” (pp. 159, 162, 164, 166–167; emphases added).

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Mary Jo Peebles

Mary Jo Peebles, Ph.D., ABPP, ABPH, is a psychoanalyst, therapist, writer, and teacher currently in private practice in Bethesda, Maryland. Her published work can be found at www.researchgate.net.