Where is the Action in the “Talking Cure”?*

The Term “implicit communication” emerged from cognitive psychology, and has entered psychoanalytic discourse via infancy research. In these contexts, “explicit” communication refers, for the most part, to verbal communication and to messages that we intend to transmit and that we know consciously we are transmitting. “Implicit” communication refers to the nonverbal levels of communication, to messages that we are transmitting automatically or without conscious intent or even conscious knowledge. The broadest modality of implicit communication is action patterns, and more specifically facial expression, posture and movement patterns, and the prosodic and rhythmic levels of vocalization. Implicit communication is thought to operate outside conscious awareness in the cognitive sense.1 Analysts might well suspect that implicit channels carry information that is repressed or dissociated as well. Related concepts in this domain are “procedural knowledge,” that is, things we know how to do automatically, like walk or conduct a conversation with another person, and “declarative knowledge,” that is, things we know in words or as facts, as in the content of statements. Cognitive psychologists believe that all communications have both levels, implicit and explicit, so that the recipient of a communication is receiving multiple messages on conscious and unconscious levels.

Although the term “implicit communication” did not arise from psychoanalysis per se, the idea also might well apply to what analysts refer to as unconscious communication, or communication that travels directly from unconscious to unconscious without the mediation of consciousness at all. Freud (1912), Ferenczi (Dupont, 1988), and Reik (1948) noted early on that communication could occur, unconscious to unconscious,