The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue

A chronically striving, self-made man addresses his therapist in the deeply resonant tone of authority, but the therapist notices that at the edge of his voice there is a raspiness that sounds like someone holding back tears. A female patient pauses, and suddenly the coolly superior tone of a black professional woman embattled in a white male world gives way to the soft, teasing voice of a little girl - equally suddenly, the topic of the session has shifted to women, women’s bodies, and pregnancy. Such nuances and shifts in the music of the patient’s voice have long been familiar to clinicians. Indeed, as Steven Knoblauch observes in this study, the music of psychotherapy has been acknowledged across a variety of theoretical orientations, from Freudian to self-psychological to interpersonal and relational perspectives. But how, he asks, can we go beyond these partial assessments and make systematic sense of this music? How do we assess the opportunities it provides for deepened therapeutic engagement? In this book, 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.