Response to Commentaries

My hope in writing this paper, with its provocative title, was to initiate a discussion about the place of verbal and “nonverbal” modes of being in our theories of both infancy and language. I am grateful to Steve Levy and Ellen Rees for providing a place for this discussion in JAPA and to the commentators for sharing their thoughts about this important controversy in our field.

There is so much I want to say about the commentaries. Yet I restrict my response to addressing three central questions raised, directly and indirectly, by the commentators: (1) Why do I use the term “nonverbal” in this paper? (2) What lies beyond language? and (3) What is the nature of language?

Fonagy is troubled by my use of the word “nonverbal.” He considers it a rhetorical device that sets up a false dichotomy and leads to a straw man argument. Fonagy is absolutely right, of course, that I chose this word to do something more than denote its standard definition, in particular to propel an emphatic argument about infancy, language, and psychoanalysis. He shares my view that the verbal/nonverbal dichotomy is not a useful way to categorize or label the different types of phenomena psychoanalysts are interested in. (Perhaps I did not make clear in my paper that I was discussing his theories precisely because they are so consistent with the direction I think we should be heading.) By contrast, “nonverbal” conceptualizations foreground the segregation of elements that are unified in and by language. Stern notes a movement toward more precise terms, such as Harrison and Tronick's use of “somatic” (2011); because this term does not set up an automatic opposition of verbal and experiential modes of being, it does not necessarily foreclose our thinking about verbal involvements in lived experience. Yet at least some in our field continue to designate important modes of experience as nonverbal, as Stern attests and Bucci demonstrates (e.g., “there are