Is an adult psychoanalyst (AIPA/IAAP) and child and adolescent psychotherapist (ACP, UK) Founder member and Past President of AIPPI (Italian Association of Psychoanalytic Child Psychotherapy) Teacher and supervisor at the AIPPI Tavistock-model Psychoanalytic Child Psychotherapy Training in Italy. Faculty member of the Master Course in Psychoanalytic Observational Studies of the University of Essex (England). She has lectured and supervised worldwide and is the co-author and editor of several books, as well as the author over a hundred publications in the leading psychoanalytic journals in Europe, USA, South America, South Africa and Turkey. Her papers have been translated in 10 languages. She is the recipient of the 1st edition of the Frances Tustin Memorial Prize (Psychoanalytic Center of California). Since 2013 she has been a teacher and supervisor in the Psychoanalytic Child and Adolescent Training Program in Istanbul.
Prenatal Dialogues – The Sound Object
Voice and rhythm in psychoanalytic practice
The introductory part of the presentation summarizes the meaning of my concept of the Sound Object. It describes the prenatal infant’s capacity to hear and listen to its sound environment, both in its rhythmical and its vocal dimension. It will be shown that rhythmical and vocal elements of experience leave traces in the child’s prenatal memory and are carried over through the caesura of birth into postnatal life. Furthermore, there is evidence that the prenatal child is not only on the receiving side of the sounds which reach it through the uterus walls but responds actively to the mother’s voice at the kinaesthetic level. This means that there is a prenatal predisposition of relatedness, which can be nourished and reinforced, or else left starving, from the earliest days of our lives. We cannot exclude that postnatal dreams may contain echoes of prenatal experiences, which may reemerge from earliest traces kept in the implicit part of our memory. The clinical part of the presentation is preceded by considerations around the possible vocal transmission of a mother’s disturbed emotional or mental state, and its interference with the unborn child’s proto-introjective processes, which in part depend on its earliest auditory nourishment. Might a disturbed mother’s voice represent an obstacle to the development of the infant’s prenatal maternal Sound Object? A vignette from the infant observation of a newborn baby bears witness to this hypothesis. A narrative of the psychoanalytic process of an adult woman illustrates some of my theoretical hypotheses concerning early auditory impingements into a child’s proto-mental development, which may manifest themselves later in life, but can, in some cases, be connected to early exposures to potentially traumatic situations, both at the rhythmical and the auditory/vocal level of relational experience.