Mimetic Understanding: The Embodied Dance of Words and Action

In this article we emphasize that Greek tragedy, surprisingly, can prove to be close to current psychoanalytic practice in exploring the paradoxical dimension of subjectivity. The interweaving of explicit/implicit communication and unconscious dimension in psychoanalytic work gives rise to emergent moments of meaning. Tragedy and psychoanalysis find their value in always striving for truth, at times grasping it, only to lose it and to have to co-construct it all over again. In the figure/background articulation of the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable, it is important to consider words not as labels fixed to define qualities and phenomena, but as living processes that go through exciting twists and turns. The words of therapy are spoken words and are part of a communicative flow that takes place in the interweaving of multiple implicit and explicit channels involving all the senses: voice quality, rhythm, sound, gaze, emotionally activated body. We have been interested in rhythm in the clinical exchange and we have delved into the study of imitation as the primary vehicle of implicit relational knowing and the transmission of pragmatic knowledge embodying ways of being in the world at very deep and procedural levels. A short vignette and a clinical case illustrate how the tool of mimesis proves useful in activating and improving our clinical sensitivity.