Words and music: Creating transformative opportunities through implicit and explicit dialogue

ABSTRACT

While psychoanalysis historically privileged the mutative power of spoken words and explicit interpretive understanding, we now know that all experience originates in, unfolds from and is felt through our bodies, enhancing or constraining what can be talked about explicitly. The therapist optimally expands her listening perspective to include implicit communications of bodily experience in order to deepen the empathic process and create new therapeutic opportunity. Principles from infant research, neurobiology, progressive establishment of a collaborative, contingent dialogue and sustaining an intention unfolding process inform the integrative approach illustrated in this paper. Psychoanalysis is a process of learning by doing a multimodal fitting together process through dialogue that is continuously implicit and intermittently verbal. The analyst must actively facilitate and scaffold implicit and explicit dialogue with the goal of fitting together and creating new experience.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative contingent dialogue
• dyadic expansion of consciousness
• fitting together
• forms of vitality
• implicit domain
• intention unfolding process

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Scott M. Davis

Scott M. Davis, M.D., is a psychoanalyst in private practice. He is Faculty at the Chicago Psychoanalytic Institute where he teaches and supervises. He is the leader of the Midwest Self Psychology Study Group and has co-chaired the last two IAPSP Chicago conferences.