Bion and Thoughts Too Deep for Words

Psychoanalysis, Suggestion, and the Language of the Unconscious

Robert Caper

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000034394
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Distinguishing psychoanalysis, as a search for truth, from suggestion, as a cure for symptoms, this book addresses the scientific status of psychoanalysis. Citing research into the relationship of infants to their caretakers, the author discusses evidence that unconscious communication is present from birth, and that this form of communication plays a central role in psychoanalysis at a level below that of verbal communication.
Informed by Bion's ideas of containment, group functioning and the fundamental psychological need for truth, this book asserts that psychoanalysis, based solely on the search for truth, has, among all psychological interventions, both a unique claim to scientific status and a unique ability to foster psychological development.

Exploring the relationship between unconscious communication, group dynamics, containment and psychological development in a highly original way, Bion and Thoughts Too Deep for Words: Psychoanalysis, Suggestion, and the Language of the Unconscious will be of great interest to psychotherapists, psychologists and psychoanalysts who are interested in the relationship between psychoanalysis and suggestion.

1

SONG-AND-DANCE

In 1966, William Condon, working at the University of Pittsburgh, devised a technique for observing conversations between adults using high-speed cinematography followed by a close, frame-by-frame analysis of the words and motions of the speaker and listener. Using this technique, Condon was able to detect body movements too ephemeral to be visible to the naked eye. These films revealed what he described in retrospect as “two sets of interesting and consistent findings” that he called self-synchrony and interactional synchrony. In the formal language of academic science, he wrote,

“Self-synchrony” refers to the integrated behavior of the individual in which correspondence can be demonstrated, for example, between the film frame of occurrence of a change in sound elements of his own speech and the film frame of occurrence of a change in his own body movements. “Interactional synchrony” designates a similar correspondence between change in sound elements in the speech of a speaker and points of change in movement configurations shown by the listener. These synchronies are not readily detectable at normal communication speed, appear to occur primarily in relation to speech, and are usually totally out of awareness of the individuals so engaged.

(Condon and Sander, 1974, p. 456)

In other words, speakers, without being aware of it, dance in subtle ways to the rhythms of their speech, and their listeners do the same. This duet of song-and-dance is deficient or absent in individuals with impaired capacity to communicate, such as those suffering from aphasia, autism or schizophrenia.¹

What was most surprising about this work was the observation that infants as young as two days also danced in response to adult speech:

[One] 2-day-old neonate sustained equally synchronous segments of change of movement [that is, as synchronous as those of adult listeners] with the adult’s speech across [a] full 89-word sequence. In other words, this is in no way accidental but a sustained and precise concurrence. Another 2-day-old sustained movement synchronous throughout, with a series of 125 words of female speech presented by tape recorder … [This] precision of synchronization … was found to characterize the correspondence between adult speech and infant movement in all 16 infants [studied]. Fourteen of these infants were from 12 hours to 2 days old and two others were at 14 days after birth. The correspondence occurred whether the adult speaker was actually present and talking to the neonate, or whether the voice came from a tape recorder. An audiotape containing American English, isolated vowel sounds, tapping sounds, and Chinese language excerpts was used as a stimulus, as well as a living adult speaker. Two of the infants were held, and the rest were supine in their cribs. Chinese, presented to American neonates, was associated with as clear a correspondence as was American English. Disconnected vowel sounds, however, failed to show the degree of correspondence which was associated with natural rhythmic speech. Tapping sounds also failed to show correspondence except at times when occurring in proximity to speech.

(Condon and Sander, 1974, p. 461)

These observations lead Condon to a perspective on human communication from which one sees infants pre-programmed to respond to the rhythms and tones of adult speech. He suggests an inquiry into human communication as “an expression of participation within shared organizational forms rather than isolated entities sending discrete messages.” The responsivity of infants to human speech rhythms literally recruits them bodily into what Condon calls the “shared organization” of human vocal communication long before they are able to understand the semantic content of words.²

Infants seem to have the ability to distinguish meaningless voice sounds (“isolated vowel sounds”) from meaningful speech. In other words, they are able to detect the presence of meaning in human speech long before they understand its semantic content. A significant portion of the meaning conveyed by speech must therefore be non-semantic. This may seem surprising until we recall the direct emotional impact of music. Human speech consists of strings of words that have meaning and syntax. Whatever their meaning, these words are normally uttered with rhythm, variations in loudness, and variations in pitch. These fundamental elements of human speech are equally fundamental elements of music.³ What Condon discovered was that people dance to the music of speech—their own and others. This dance begins at least as early as the day of birth, when there is no question of the semantic content of speech having any impact. The music of speech “entrains” dance-like movement, and the infant is first recruited into the linguistic community by being given music it can dance to. Language is not simply something learned by children from adults. It is also a vehicle through which what Condon calls innate human organizational forms may be shared and joined.

Donald Meltzer has proposed that the genesis of language is

essentially two-tiered, having a primitive song-and-dance level (the most primitive form of symbol-formation) for the communication of emotional states of mind … and that upon this foundation of deep grammar there is subsequently superimposed the lexical level of words for denoting objects, actions and qualities of the external world, that is, information.

(Meltzer, 1986, p. 181)

What we might ordinarily regard as language is only a part of language, and not its most fundamental part. Meltzer distinguishes between a deep musical language, used for communicating about the internal world (that is, states of mind), upon which is built a more superficial, lexical language useful for communicating about the external, material world.⁴ Michael Paul (1989) has described the rhythm, pace and intonation of patients’ speech, and how their difficulties in thinking about or understanding interpretations may be quite effectively addressed by focussing their attention on the elements of their speech that seem designed to interfere with understanding and contact with oneself. He describes the music of resistance.

Susan Maiello (2013) points out that the foetus has the capacity to hear from mid-gestation onward, and that this capacity is stimulated regularly by the sound of the mother’s voice and heartbeat. Even after this experience is interrupted by birth, rhythmic sound and movements will calm the newborn.⁵ She adds that awareness of the presence of the mother’s voice also sets the stage for awareness of its absence, an important developmental achievement: “This voice being present could be the first source of comfort, but also it could give a sensation of absence or vacuum when it isn’t heard, setting the following empty space in which … thought will be born” (Maiello, 2013).

In a related observation, Ellen Dissanayake has observed that rhythmic movement in groups—dance—has the effect of entraining the minds of the participant individuals in a powerful and characteristic way. She observes that “simply keeping together in time with other persons produces a feeling of well-being or euphoria”, and goes on to recall that,

The historian, William H. McNeill (1995) has given a name—“muscular bonding”—to the phenomenon of fellow feeling that he experienced as a young army draftee during close-order drill, and speculates that it evolved because of its contribution to group solidarity. He described it as “a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life”.

(Malloch and Trevarthen, 2009, p. 539)

Dissanayake’s interpretation of this is that, “In ceremonies, bodies swayed to music result in minds relieved of existential anxieties, firmed by convictions, and bonded with their fellows in a common cause” (ibid., p. 542).

A third line of observation about the mutual unconscious responsiveness of humans to other humans is the so-called “still-face experiment” devised by Edward Tronick and his colleagues in 1975 and widely used as a research tool since that time. It concerns what appears to be an exquisite early sensitivity to physical mien (Tronick, 1989). A witness to one of Tronick’s presentations of this work wrote,

First, a split screen image of a 70-day-old infant and his mother appeared on the conference ballroom’s big screen as they engaged in the pleasant cyclic ebb and flow of a face-to-face interaction. Then, the dyad reappeared in a “still-face” condition during which the mother remained “completely unresponsive, with a flat expressionless face for 3 minutes.”

The infant first orients toward the mother and greets her expectantly. But when the mother fails to respond appropriately, the infant “rapidly sobers and grows wary. He makes repeated attempts to get the interaction into its usual reciprocal pattern. When these attempts fail, the infant orients his face and body away from his mother with a withdrawn, hopeless facial expression.” This is soon followed by tearful distress.

(Adamson and Frick, 2003, pp. 462–463)

These observations indicate that infants respond not only to the music of human speech, but also to human facial expression, and that a responsive face has an organizing or animating effect on an infant, while an unresponsive face where a responsive one was anticipated can lead to withdrawal, despair and disorganization.

Condon showed that infants organize themselves physically in tune with the music of speech, while Tronick showed that they depend on a live, responsive face to maintain their psychological organization. McNeill’s observations about “muscular bonding” suggest that rhythmic group movement—line dancing—produces a sense of enlargement that transcends the boundaries of the individual—another example of “shared organization”.

Speech, body movement, and facial expression are the major conduits through which people convey emotion. Infants appear to be sensitive to these kinds of expression from birth onward, and are able to use it to obtain a direct read of the emotional states of other people. Furthermore, there appears to be a need in even very young infants to synchronize or align their emotional state with that of others, and to receive feedback that this has occurred, if they are to avoid psychological disorganization. It is hard to resist the idea that humans are born with a capacity to interpret subtle cues of facial expression and vocal intonation and rhythm. This capacity appears so soon after birth that it is hard to imagine it being learned so quickly simply from interactions with other humans.

In a recent review of the past forty years of research on the role of song-and-dance in human interaction, Stephen Malloch and Colwyn Trevarthen (2009), propose “a new theory of how human will and emotion are immediately shareable with others through gestures of the body and voice.” They note that in this research,

babies were found to be more aware of human presence and its activity and affections than they were of physical objects or events, and this strong curiosity for humans was expressed in responsive smiles, calls and gestures which excited their mothers and “captured” them into the flow of the present moment of the exchange.

(Malloch and Trevarthen, 2009, p. 1)

Note that the connection works both ways: the infant’s smiles, calls and gestures exciting and captivating their mothers, recruiting them into a synchronous mental state with the infant, just as the mothers recruit them into their states by cooing, tonally exaggerated “baby talk” and singing. Music and dance are a two way street, creating a shared mental organization where there would otherwise be isolated individuals. So fundamental is the phenomenon of synchronization that we must question whether an “otherwise” of entirely discreet, disconnected individuals is ever really found.

This grouping is mediated not by the semantics of the words, but by the music of the voice and the dance of facial expression and physical gestures. Echoing Condon and Meltzer, Malloch and Trevarthen point out that this group connection is not communication in the ordinary sense of the word, since “the information carried by interpersonal rhythms does not move directly from one person to another. Thus information cannot easily be conceptualized as messages since the information is always simultaneously shared and always about the state of the relationship” (2009, p. 2).

This connection

complements [verbal] language by providing us with a means for sharing coordinated, embodied space and time while lessening the potential for disagreements based on the particularity or “discretising” of verbal meaning… we can agree in the shared embodied space of music and dance, whereas we may disagree in the shared objective space of a verbal discussion because our version of “reality” differs from that of another.

They conclude that through this

collaborative musicing,… our sense of separateness moves towards a sense of being an inseparable part of community… an experience [that may be called] “multi-subjective, in the sense that we both lose and retain our subjectivity within the collective” I… musicality’s nature of engaging one with an other, or many with many, intersubjectively, is intrinsic to musicality’s healing potential.

(2009, pp. 6–7)

Human animals draw each other automatically, regularly and irresistibly into each other’s mental and emotional spheres, spontaneously forming communities marked by shared mental organization. This recruitment activity constitutes a substantial part of everyday mental life. The universal, unconscious tendency for emotional synchronization produces a sense of enlargement or connection that transcends the boundaries of the individual, and gives r...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1. Song-and-dance
• 2. Song-and-dance and the internal world
• 3. The dynamics of unconscious communication
• 4. Psychoanalysis and suggestion
• 5. Psychoanalysis beyond suggestion
• 6. The analyst’s Oedipal dilemma
• 7. Psychoanalysis and science
• 8. The craft of psychoanalysis
• 9. Psychoanalysis and play
• 10. Containment, self-containment and identification
• 11. Finding the context
• 12. Summary and conclusions
• Index