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Speech, the associating stream of verbalizations, is the mode of communication par excellance in psychoanalysis. Authoritative literature of the psychoanalytic situation (Stone, 1961) and technique (Greenson, 1967) hardly mention the question of analysis of non-verbal behavior. Characteristically we have to search rather far back in time to unearth the literature in this field.
Freud (1901) discussed this topic in “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life”, under the headings “Erroneosly Carried-out Action” and “Symptomatic and Chance Action”. He stated that the muscular movements in the body, face, fingers and hands were manifestations of emotional processes and were reactions to former experiences associatively stimulated. They also represented pleasurable gratification and could be a sensitive means of detecting conscious and unconscious psychic processes. Specifically, they could betray changes of affect, sensations of pleasure, ambivalence or the emergence into consciousness of repressed fantasies and memories. He assumed that motor inhibitions e.g. in the hands, could be developed because a free use of the hands would imply motor gratification of forbidden instinctual drive impulses. Freud's (1914) study of Michelangelo's Moses can be said to be an example of analysis of nonverbal behavior.
Abraham (1913) wrote an article covering what he called locomotor anxiety. Like Freud, he observed that patients could manifest inhibitions of different bodily movements because these movements stimulated forbidden and repressed sexual impulses. The repression of these impulses could be maintained by inhibiting the bodily movements which otherwise could gratify and express these forbidden impulses. Especially motor