Discussion

This is a lovely paper. It is courageous, honest, creative, beautifully described and researched. Dr. Pally shares her own observations of her patient and herself, all the while making a concerted effort to keep learning more. Recognizing that there was something happening, something she was experiencing and perceiving that did not meet with the knowledge she had so far acquired in her training—nor from supervisor or analyst—she was undaunted. Something needed more explication she felt, as she refused to bury her data in already known formulations. This is a splendid example of the essence of psychoanalytic discovery—remaining open to learning and reconsidering truths which we had believed we already knew. As such, it demonstrates the challenge, and wonder, of the psychoanalytic enterprise at its best. And even after Dr. Pally thought she had helped the patient through her resistances, finally to arrive at a commitment to the treatment, she did not stop there, but continued her investigations, searching through the literature, to help in understanding her reactions, always stretching her capacity as an analyst.

Dr. Pally takes us to a central theme in our clinical endeavors, inviting us to tease out the use we make of the nonverbal in our work, and she goes on to consider its relation to the findings of infant researchers. To her citations, I would like to add two names, which I think would also be particularly relevant to her enterprise—Colwyn Trevarthen and Louis Sander. Trevarthen (1985) has illuminated aspects of mother-infant “protoconversations,” of which he speaks as “intuitive motherese.” This is a form of unlearned conversation which has peculiar features of pitch, timing, prosody, and repetition