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This paper was published in 1974 by Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 10: 41–55. Its findings and theoretical hypotheses have been extensively published in Spanish in numerous articles, and his book La comunicación en terapéutica psicoanalítica (Communication in psychoanalytic therapy) was published in 1962 by EUDEBA in Buenos Aires.
In this paper I will support the notions: (a) that some features of the verbalizations in analysis allow us to understand unconscious phantasies; (b) that these traits are valuable when we research psychoanalytic dialogue so as to transmit empirical data in scientific communications, and (c) that what I suggest in (a) has further consequences for effecting strategic, technical, and tactical approaches with which to break up Id resistances (compulsion to repeat).
a The paralinguistic elements2 of adult verbalization have an earlier root than articulate language; they somehow resemble infantile ways of communicating inasmuch as they constitute a manner of codifying experiences that cannot as yet be put in verbal language. They provide support for the objectivization of the qualities of unconscious phantasies. One of the advantages of this approach lies in the fact that we can effect deductive inferences on empirical bases in the dialogue during
the course of the analytic treatment. I shall, as I have written elsewhere (Liberman, 1962), (1966), (1971), introduce here some findings from different currents of contemporary linguistics that I consider to be useful so as to circumscribe the observations. I have found that the paralinguistic elements of verbalization as components of the patient’s “speech” in the session provide the empirical bases for our statements about unconscious phantasy.3
b We must distinguish between our actual work with the patient in the session and our study of psychoanalytic dialogue, taking some elements from the sessions and following a pattern of systematization when sessions are over. In this particular ca