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Psychoanalysts have from the earliest days of our discipline been working to understand and articulate the place of language in mental life and therapeutic change. This is a more complex question than it might seem. Words emerged from gestures and sounds relatively late in our evolutionary history, and in individual development spoken words emerge only after a time. How then do words fit into and function in a bodily context in which communication predates words? Freud (1915) described a relationship between words and their origins in bodily experience using the concepts of word presentation and thing presentation. He was well aware that these aspects of speech and language are somehow joined but that each functions differently in the mind: “But word-presentations, for their part too, are derived from sense perceptions, in the same way as thing-presentations are” (p. 202). Freud hypothesized that perceptual experiences are represented unconsciously as fragments of sensory experience (visual, acoustic, tactile, etc.) that are associated with objects, things, in the physical world. Thus, these thing presentations are composites of memory traces from various sensory domains that are then associated with words for things. But words are themselves rooted in memories of perceptual experiences, of a sound that was heard (a “sound image”), a word that was seen (a “visual image”), and memories of movements of the muscles concerned with speech and of the hands (a “kinaesthetic image”) (Freud 1891). Psychoanalysts might well wonder how these modes, nonverbal and verbal, influence a mind. Scholars and researchers, too, have wondered and have contributed to the effort to explore how these two kinds of signifiers function, together and separately, in shaping subjective experience.
Jeanine Vivona invites psychoanalysts to consider the impact of the words spoken to infants before their birth and during their first year of life—not just the sounds and the rhythms and the feel of thes