A Note on Dan Stern’s Vitality Affects

In his introduction to The Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985), Dan Stern stated, “As an infant I spent considerable time in the hospital, and in order to know what was going on, I became a watcher, a reader of the non verbal” (p. ix). He viewed the implicit nonverbal as a necessary complement to the explicit verbal dialogue, the subject matter of psychoanalysis. The communication of vitality affects could be thought of as the relational element in speech. As I understand his concept of vitality affects, he was not referring to a specific emotion, but to a transcendent communicative function of a range of affects that convey the vital state of the other.

Regarding this concept of vitality affects, Modell acknowledged that he was influenced by the contribution of the philosopher Suzanne Langer, who suggested that works of art convey the feeling of “felt life.” Unlike a specific emotion such as anxiety or anger, vitality affects are more global, conveying an overall state of being in relation to the other (Stern, 1985). In this, I believe that he was influenced by Andre Green’s concept of the “dead mother” (Green, 1986).

I suggest that the vitality of the other is communicated by the musical qualities of speech. This is in accord with the work of the infant researcher Colwyn Trevarthen. In this tribute to the work of Dan Stern, I focus on the function of music as a primordial means of conveying meaning. I believe, along with the anthro-paleontologist Steven Mithen (2006), that musical communication in modern speech is a vestige of human phylogenetic inheritance. There is a strong inference that musical communication existed in earlier species of mankind prior to the development of language (embracing words and grammar). With the advent of homo sapiens, the earlier musical form of communication rode piggy back, as it were, upon spoken language, as it does today. There is considerable evidence that infants infer meaning from the musical qualities of infant directed s