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This book has four parts: “The Choreography of Conversation,” “The Setting of the Unseen Scene,” “Studies of Nonverbal Behavior,” and “The Logic of Action in the Clinical Setting,” in fifteen attractive chapters. The author is a professional dancer and psychoanalyst. She happens to be a gifted writer, as well. She provides examples from anthropological field observation as well as multiple clinical vignettes. She also presents seven cases written with an almost Proustian sensitivity to nuances in the transference/countertransference interplay.
La Barre's book is “an invitation to look more deeply into what is explicitly denied but recognized as a contingency—the nonverbal” (p. 95). Her main thesis revolves around the question, “How can a more articulated vision of nonverbal behavior help us enhance our analytic work?” (p. 233). In addressing this, she draws from clinical experience, but also from research in the fields of infant observation, anthropology, experimental psychology, neurophysiology, sociology, and dance, citing authors with whom most analysts will probably be unacquainted.
La Barre writes persuasively on the “seamlessness” of the verbal and kinesic dimensions of observable clinical material. She asserts that