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Any experienced psychotherapist or psychoanalyst will have an intuitive feel for what Knoblauch wishes to convey when he speaks of the “tone,“the”“rhythm,” the musical feel of a therapeutic process that is in full swing. The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue promises to give us a glimpse of how the cadence of what happens in an analytic dialogue reflects and influences the ongoing relational process. The book's title, however, is misleading: Knoblauch's project is more specific, and more intriguing. He means to use the metaphor of a particular kind of music—jazz—to address the tonal, rhythmic, and harmonic properties of non-verbal communication in the therapeutic process, which might help track intersubjective experience in the affective field of therapeutic dialogue.
The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue is structured around the elements of modern mainstream jazz, such as rhythm, tone, harmony, dissonance, accompaniment, and improvisation. Clinical material in each chapter is presented in a way that resembles nothing so much as a jazz composition, replete with the establishment of rhythm and tone, moment-to-moment improvisational changes, and restatement of theme. This intentional structure is recapitulated in the book as a whole and gives it a self-conscious flavour, leaving this reader with the impression that the author's use of jazz as a metaphor for therapeutic process is rather affected. The three opening