You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
When Joe Lichtenberg and I talked about an issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry focusing on musicality in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, we envisioned essays about the importance of paralanguage in the therapeutic process. Known also as prosody or vocalics, paralanguage refers to “measures of speech that are content free” (Harper et al., 1978, p. 20), and include elements such as: pitch; variability in pitch; volume; variability in volume; pauses while one has the conversational floor; switching pauses (latency to respond to another’s vocal communication); rhythm; speech rate; dysfluencies, etc. (Paddock & Nowicki, 1986). In particular, I imagined papers that eloquently rhapsodized about the importance of prosodic channels of communication in forming and maintaining the therapeutic alliance, communicating empathic attunement, warmth, and genuineness from the analyst – as well as how both patient and analyst sang together to compose melodies of mutual meaning (Aron, 1996).
Indeed, recent studies indicate that paralanguage (or, how we say what we say): can powerfully convey positive emotions (Kamiloglu et al., 2020) and is influential in the social-cognitive development of infants (Beebe & Lachmann, 2002, 2014; Jaffe et al., 2001; Saint-Georges et al., 2013; Shute, 2006); communicates negative mood in serious psychiatric conditions (Cummins et al., 2015; Hall et al., 1995; Marmar et al., 2019; Rice et al., 1969; Starkweather, 1967; Tang et al., 2022); can be significantly impaired in persons with Autism Spectrum Disorder (Leung et al., 2022; Zhang et al., 2022), Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (Köchel et al., 2015), and Alexithymia (Goerlich-Dobre et al., 2014); can convey a speaker’s gender (Leung et al., 2018); can communicate interpersonally influential attitudes (e.g., authoritativeness, confidence, sarcasm, complaints, superiority, etc.) (Guyer et al., 2021; Mauchand & Pell, 2021, 2022; Mitchell & Ross, 2013; Sorokowski et al., 2019); can in some instances