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The subject of the analyst's voice evokes intriguing reverie. We might initially assume the voice to refer to an analyst's particular theoretical frame and point of view, that which Schafer refers to as “becoming an analyst of one persuasion or another” (1983). The analyst's “voice” might refer, for example, to a classical, Kleinean, object relations, or Kohutian point of view, and how it shapes how the analyst hears the patient's material and what she says in terms of the content and timing of interpretations.
Another meaning that particularly intrigues me of late, however, relates more to the physicality of the analyst's presence in the analytic encounter. I am generally interested in how her bodily presence, shape, and in this case, particularly her’ sound—her voice, its tone, timber, vocal resonance—communicate evocatively in ways that touch her patient's experiences before words, symbols, and lexical content. How do we attune the analyst's third ear (Lothane, 1981) to pick up these reverberations in patients? I am interested in how to deepen our capacity to use our analytic instrument (Balter, Lothane, and Spencer, 1980; Isakower, 1939) for transient mutually related regressions, to enable resonance with our patient's physicality and inchoate bodily states of mind.
At times in the course of an analysis the analyst's voice evokes the powerful reverberations and timbres of the early mother's vocalizations; perhaps not just the early mother of the nursery, but also even before birth, as the infant, rocked and rolled in the quadraphonic audio chamber of the womb, heard and felt her voice. The voice, together with the mother's heartbeat, is the baby's first sense of otherness. Thus, at certain times in the analytic sound chamber, content doesn't matter at all; it is the rhythms, tones, staccatos, and mellifluous sounds of the analyst's voice that matter. While it is a completely physical experience, it also exists in the realm of the “unthought known,” varying self st