Say Anything: Noise, Tenderness, and the Rift Between the Saying and the Said

This article reflects on fraught clinical encounters in which saying something, even anything seems to matter more than what is said. In such moments, my tender voice is like atopic noise – or sound out of place – that alienates me and my patient because it augurs an existence beyond the devitalizing object worlds to which we have become inured. I think of such worlds as the product of early deprivation and of the perilous historical conjuncture in which we find ourselves. When called to say something or even anything, I incarnate a sometimes painful and humiliating rift between the noise of the saying and the uncertain coherence of the said. This incarnation may forge a sound barrier that can help me and my patient courageously undergo an unmooring yet life-affirming depersonalization. An aleatory and turbulent process, such depersonalization occurs along an ontological frontier that psychosomatically disturbs individual identities. Though catastrophic, this atopic process can paradoxically reassure the dyad that some other life – some other topos or setting – may come into being. I illustrate these ideas by turning to a range of thinkers, in particular Michel de M’Uzan and Alphonso Lingis, as well as to clinical and experiential vignettes from three sources: my psychoanalytic practice; Paul Williams’s trilogy, The Fifth Principle; and René Spitz’s documentary, Grief: A Peril in Infancy.