Bodies and Social Rhythms: Navigating Unconscious Vulnerability and Emotional Fluidity (Psychoanalysis in a New Key Book Series)
by Steven Knoblauch
This exciting new book traces the development of an unfolding challenge for psychoanalytic attention, which augments contemporary theoretical lenses focusing on structures of meaning, with an accompanying registration different than and interacting with structural experience. This accompanying registration of experience is given the term ‘fluidity’ in order to characterize it as too fast moving and unformulated to be symbolized with linguistic categorization.
Expanding attention from speech meaning to include embodied registrations of rhythm involving tonality, pauses and accents can catalyze additional and often emotionally more significant communications central to the state of the transactional field in any psychoanalytic moment. This perspective is contextualized within recognition of how cultural practices and beliefs are carried along both structural and fluid registrations of experience and can shape emotional turbulence for both interactants in a clinical encounter. Experiences of gender, culture, class and race emerging as sources of conflict and mis-recognition are engaged and illustrated throughout the text.
This book, part of the popular “Psychoanalysis in a New Key” book series, will appeal to teaching and practicing psychoanalysts, but also an increasing volume of therapists attending to embodied experience in their practice and drawn to the practical clinical illustrations.
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Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment
by Beatrice Beebe (Author) , Steven Knoblauch (Author) , Judith Rustin (Author) , Dorienne Sorter (Author)
The authors use a dyadic systems model of self- and interactive regulation as a lens for comparing diverse theories of intersubjectivity, both in adults and infants. Building on the definition of intersubjectivity in infancy as correspondence and matching of expressions, the authors offer an expanded view of the presymbolic origins of intersubjectivity. They address the place of interactive regulation, problems with the concept of matching, the roles of self-regulation and of difference, and the balance of self- and interactive regulation. An adult treatment of early trauma is described through detailed clinical case material illustrating both the verbal narrative and the implicit “action dialogue” operating largely outside of awareness.
This book includes new discussions by Theodore Jacobs, arguing that nonverbal communication is vitally important to psychoanalysis, and by Regina Pally, arguing that aspects of this book have parallels in neuroscience.
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The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue
Steven H. Knoblauch (Author)
Such nuances and shifts in the music of a patient’s voice have long been familiar to clinicians. Indeed, as Steven Knoblauch observes, the music of psychotherapy has been acknowledged across a variety of theoretical orientations, from Freudian to self-psychological to interpersonal and relational perspectives. In The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue, Knoblauch provides a model of “resonant minding” in which the musical elements of speech become a major source of information about unconscious communication and action. More specifically, resonant minding, by distinguishing between discrete and continuous levels of communication, between the verbal and the musical, offers a way of accessing and affecting levels of unconscious interactive process by attending to the musical edge of dialogue — provided only that we can hear it.
Drawing on detailed clinical vignettes, he explores the shifts in musical expression across a sequence of patient-therapist interactions in order to show how the dyadic logic of mutual improvisation operates at the periphery to guide the continuous flow of unconscious communication and mutual regulation. In so doing, he provides a vivid sense of how the shifting movement of the patient’s “solo performance” can be facilitated and enriched by the creative “accompaniment” of the therapist.
Ultimately, Knoblauch argues, the music of therapy is not only another road to the unconscious, but one uniquely able to convey emergent meanings in a variety of domains, from conflicting cultural identifications to the experience of the body to the emergence of desire. His vision of mutual immersion in a shared “performance” aimed at fostering growth coalesces into a major contribution – at once evocative and clinically consequential – to the current movement to grasp nonverbal behavior and processes of mutual regulation as they enter into all effective psychotherapy.