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The central thesis of Steven H. Knoblauch's slender new book The Musical Edge of Therapeutic Dialogue is that “attention to the dimensions of the musical edge gives the analyst a broadened scope for perceiving meaning: the analyst's responsiveness … may be critically shaped by the nonverbal dimensions of his actions” (p. 80).
knoblauch elaborates this nonverbal dimension primarily in intersubjectivist terms against a metaphoric backdrop of music, most particularly jazz improvisation. To Knoblauch, the jazz improviser,
using only the nonverbal contours of sound, is moved by and moves those with whom she interacts, other musicians, and listeners through attention to, and participation with, the tones and rhythms on this edge of experience. Her solo represents the shaping and reshaping of sound contours as call and response to the matching and mismatching, tension-building and resolving, space-opening and closing signals being exchanged with those around her. (p. 160)
Continuing, he writes that “similarly, therapist and patient, often unconsciously but sometimes consciously, are influencing and intersecting their subjective experience of each other with the music of their utterances” (p. 160).
Following an earlier career as a jazz performer, Knoblauch is currently a faculty and supervising analyst at The Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity in New York, a clinical training program that emphasizes the systematic study and clinical applications of psychoanalystic