NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION

The question of nonverbal communication involves two distinct areas of epistemology whose theoretical and clinical characteristics have, as of 2005, yet to be articulated: a developmental and linguistic field and a psychoanalytic field. In terms of developmental issues, Frédéric François notes that the body has been largely overlooked by theoreticians of meaning, language, and communication. Understanding facts often begins with an understanding of the final state of their onto-genesis and it is only afterwards that we can retroactively investigate the roots, foundations, and precursors of the object of study. According to François, "It may be the descriptions of the final state that enable us to begin with well-formed utterances, with syntax, and then go on to examine their semantics, whatever it is those utterances may want to say and, ultimately, of the pragmatics, of the reasons for saying, of what it is that urges us to speak and what we are doing when we speak. And although it is true that linguistics has followed this sequence in its development, it is just as true that the child follows the opposite sequence." In other words, it is the result of a natural process in the history of understanding that structural linguistics has developed (Ferdinand de Saussure) before what is currently known as subjectal or dynamic linguistics, which makes greater use of preverbal levels of communication.

Today it is obvious that work on the development of language in children essentially involves an investigation of its corporeal roots, whether these are found in the work of pragmatists (John Austin, Jerome Bruner), cognitivists (C. Trevarthen), or those interested in suprasegmental elements of the speech chain (Ivan Fonagy). All of them attach great importance to deepening our understanding of the preverbal communication that precedes the development of verbal communication, but which accompanies it, shadowlike, throughout life.

For neurophysiology, verbal communication, often referred to as encoded or digital communication, serves an analytical function and is primarily supported by the major hemisphere (involving the integration of the "twofold articulation" of language into phonemes and monemes described by André Martinet), while preverbal communication, known as suprasegmental or analogical, is said to serve a more global and holistic function, and is principally supported by the minor hemisphere (integration of behavioral communication and the music of language: prosody, rate of speech, rhythm, timbre, intensity, and so on, all of which are elements that constitute the nonverbal component of verbal speech).

In terms of psychoanalysis, the history of research on nonverbal communication is superimposed on the history of the concept of counter-transference to the extent that the latter is essentially grounded in a more or less archaic level of emotional communication. From this point of view so-called preverbal communication refers as much to bodily communication, mimicry and behavior, as it does to the unencoded element of language.

It was primarily Melanie Klein who exposed this field of study by her introduction of the concept of projective identification. The importance that the post-Kleinian movement accorded to the process of counter-transference is well known. For rather than being considered an obstacle to therapy, counter-transference was treated as a fundamental tool for working with the patient, regardless of his or her age. Wilfred Bion, through concepts like the "mother's capacity for reverie" and the "alpha function," did much to improve our understanding of these primitive levels of communication, which come into play in group dynamics and in the minds of psychotic subjects. Bion's model was then used for investigating the development of the mental life of the infant.

Julia Kristeva studied the suprasegmental elements of the language of depressive patients. Guy Rosolato, through his concept of "metaphoric-metonymic oscillation," tried to take into account the modalities of the transition between representations of things and representations of words, or, ultimately, between unconscious systems and preconscious-conscious systems, modalities that would clarify the different levels, analog and digital, of communication. Gradually, and in parallel with this work, affect began to assume the function of "representance" (André Green), which acts directly as a medium for nonverbal communication.

At present it is in the investigation of analytic therapies for very young children or patients presenting archaic pathologies that the work of developmental psychologists (Daniel N. Stern) and psychoanalysts finds common ground. Nonetheless, research on non-verbal communication has become a central part of therapy for all patients, even adult and neurotic patients.

Bernard Golse

See also: Alpha function; Amae, concept of; Counter-identification; Empathy; Identification; Infans; Infantile psychosis; Infant observation (direct); Maternal reverie, capacity for; Primary object; Projective identification; Telepathy.

Bibliography

Bion, Wilfred R. (1967). A Theory of Thinking. In Second Thoughts. London: Heinemann. (Reprinted from International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 43, (1962), 4-5.)

Fonagy, Ivan. (1983). La Vive Voix: Essais de psycho-phonétique. Paris: Payot.

Green, André. (1973). Le Discours vivant. La conception psychanalytique de l'affect. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France.

Klein, Melanie. (1946). Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms. International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 27, 99-110. (Reprinted 1975. In The Writings of Melanie Klein, III, 1946-1963, pp. 1-24). London: Hogarth Press.

Kristeva, Julia. (1989). Black sun: Depression and melancholia (Leon S. Roudiez, Trans.). New York: Columbia University Press. (Original work published 1987)