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Throughout the last century, verbal interpretation has been an inseparable companion to the process of psychoanalysis, and the ability to interpret effectively continues to be highly valued by psychoanalysts. Today many of us can convincingly argue that a thoughtful, well-timed interpretation still constitutes the most significant therapeutic event that can occur in an analysis.
Our acknowledgment of the importance of spoken interpretation can have its disadvantages, though. Efforts to fine-tune our ability to convey understanding by verbal means may run the risk of disavowing another essential aspect of our clinical work: namely that of nonverbal activities, which themselves can have a very powerful therapeutic impact. That we sometimes have difficulty finding the language to describe these activities and may occasionally neglect them shouldn't surprise us—nonverbal issues seem to be the stuff of intuition, not objective discourse. In most relationships, much of what is going on nonverbally is usually not talked about directly—it is simply experienced between the lines. Regardless of any tendency to overlook them, these between-the-lines, nonverbal events can contribute significantly both in achieving understanding, and communicating that understanding to our patients. In fact, I believe that a therapist needs to demonstrate his thinking through his behavior as a necessary adjunct to communicating with words. In this way, I hope to elevate the realm of behavior to be equal to the realm of language in the interpretive process.
Our discussion calls for the observation of two dimensions of experience within the psychoanalytic setting: one mediated by words and the other by action. Recently, there have been varied discussions of this division using several different terms to describe the verbal and nonverbal; in particular, the recent use of explicit and implicit by D. N. Stern et al. (2004) an