Meeting of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

DISCUSSION: Dr. Theodore Lipin commented that Dr. Kanzer shows how the analysand's substantial wish for recovery, and the analyst's substantial wish to understand and heal, affect significantly the conscious and unconscious, verbal and nonverbal, interactions in the therapeutic alliance. These wishes stimulate and also simultaneously modify the nonverbal tendencies to act out (discharge) drives and to relive certain repressed infantile experiences. By the operation of these wishes, such tendencies to nonverbal expression are harnessed to serve as modes of communication, bringing about progressive health and progressive ability to use verbal modes of communication. In short, under the new conditions of the therapeutic alliance some nonverbal activities, such as demonstrations by reliving or by transient alterations in mental functioning, can be viewed as nonverbal communications by an impaired ego. Dr. Kanzer also shows that words and the functions employing words may be used for nonverbal communication. Words are a special category of symbols usually employed to represent aspects of objective things or phenomena, to express one's inner life, or to influence others. Such uses of verbal symbols, however, may be altered by displacing upon a verbal symbol, or upon a function employing verbal symbols, the qualities of 'things', i.e., alien qualities that have nothing to do with the word's normal representation or the function's normal activity. A verbal symbol or function so altered becomes a 'thing', utilized by nonverbal functions to discharge sexual or aggressive drives, or to serve adaptive ego functions, including the nonverbal communication of repressed memories. Some analysands have experienced substantial traumas during their earliest maturational phases and have very primitive, nonverbal representations and memory traces of these highly pathogenic events. These representations subsequently have not been cathected with verbal symbols (primal repression)