Of Course We Can Talk … but Can We Also Hum? Reply to Gerson's Commentary on “Finding the Analyst's Voice”

I very much appreciate this opportunity to take up Sam Gerson's playful inquiry, “Can We Talk?” in his thoughtful response to my paper “The Body/Mind Dialectic Within The Psychoanalytic Subject: Finding The Analyst's Voice.” Gerson's reply evidences an appreciative understanding and considerable familiarity with the body of my work and we have had the pleasure of a number of collegial dialogues including sharing a panel together. In “Can We Talk?” he opens by summarizing my focus in this paper about patients’ potentially reparative immersion in the physicality of the analyst's voice. At the same time, he highlights a couple of points that may indeed lead to misunderstanding my ideas about timing and balance in relation to maternal erotic transferences and countertransferences. I am predisposed to respond to him somewhat playfully with an accord that we can certainly “talk” on the condition that we can also “hum!”

Part of the difficulty for both of us is the nature of our dialogue: we are each presenting aspects of our ideas in a brief and rather formal paper for didactic purpose. Inevitably both the richness, vitality and complexity of the lived-in clinical encounter, and even certain theoretical points may be elipted for the sake of brevity or focus. Omissions, lack of elaboration and confusion may result. For that reason, the opportunity to engage in such a back and forth dialogue in this journal can be illuminating. In my “Analyst's Voice” paper, I cited Gerson, desiring to emphasize how at times we may be struggling with a patient who appears perverse or distancing when the patient actually craves and often doesn't even know it, a maternal reparative, mutually tolerable and satisfying regression into preverbal bodily states. Gerson, in his “Shared Body” paper argues that his patient's attachment to his voice seemed to him to represent fetishization and distancing. He mentions that he tried to think that her “fetishlike relating to me might represent a facilitatin