The Experience of Voice in Analytic Listening

The infant's first cry on emerging from its mother's womb is also its first announcement of being there. This sound, in turn, evokes the mother's own vocal response: echoing the infant's cry, she wraps it in a vocal blanket, which has a twofold effect of soothing it as well as making it meaningful. But even before birth, the infant already communicates with what lies outside the womb through the sounds that reach it, whether originating from the mother's body or from the external world. The infant's first notion of the world is, in fact, a notion of sound: the mother's voice, her heartbeat, the sounds of people approaching her body and then turning away.

Anzieu, in his book The Skin Ego (1985), discusses what he calls the “sound-envelope” (p. 173), consisting alternately of the sounds produced by the environment and the sounds produced by the infant. The primary space is an acoustic one. Anzieu (1985) argues that prior to the visual dimension, which Winnicott (1971) and Lacan (2002) emphasize in their work on the mirror stage and the mirror role of the mother, there is a “sound mirror” whose role is crucial for the newborn's development. The new infant's most familiar sound is that of the scream, and Anzieu (1985) refers to four structurally and functionally distinct types of screams in an infant less than three weeks old: the scream of hunger, the scream of anger, the scream of pain (originating either inside or outside), and the scream of frustration. Each of these screams has its typical characteristics, but the scream of hunger is the most basic of the four, with the other three constituting variations of it. All these screams are pure physiological reflexes, triggering in the mother certain reactions which come to sooth them. Miraculously, the baby is most adequately calmed by the mother's voice. From the second week of life, it is her voice that outdoes any other sound when it comes to pacifying the baby, even the visual presence of her face.