L’harmonie des sphères de la thérapie de couple

Introduction^[1]

This paper focuses on musical channels of communication in couple therapy.^[2] From the dawn of life, language emerges embedded in musicality, paralinguistic parameters of speech being the means by which emotional meaning is communicated.^[3]

At birth a baby recognises the sound of its mother’s voice, previously heard vibrating across the amniotic fluid. Resonating with this unique little newborn, an intuitive parent will attune to the emotional meaning communicated through baby’s lip and tongue protrusions, coos, gurgles, murmurs, humming, flute-like joyful cries, and disgruntled, fretful cries.

The emotionally expressive power of musicality within language continues throughout a child’s development into adulthood, and into the intimacy of a couple relationship. Musicality in early infant/adult communication is therefore of great relevance to the field of family and couple therapy, enhancing a therapist’s appreciation of the means by which emotional and psychological states are conveyed through acoustic fundaments of language.

Part One of the paper uses a fictionalised clinical vignette to present the theme of musical fundaments of couple communication. Part Two consists of more in-depth discussion of such themes and their variations. Here we locate the precursors of the love duets of a couple in the resonating chamber of the womb and then what Meltzer (1986) called the “song-and-dance” of infant and caregiver at birth. Yet couples are not always in tune and in step with one another. Inadvertently reading on each other’s toes, love songs all too readily become cacophonous screaming matches. I explore in greater depth the acoustic features of interlocking marital scenes and how the couple therapist might usefully respond to disrupt such scenes.

Part One. Music of the spheres of couple therapy

Consonance and dissonance

When a couple engage in couple therapy, myriad channels of conscious and unconscious communication are conveyed through body language, facial expressions, tone of voice and other paralinguistic musical elements. The conversation of a couple in harmony with one another tends to be tuneful, flowing and improvisatory with an easy equality of turn-taking, pauses indicating when to chime in. They tune into each other’s wavelength, tonal centre and associated overtones, enjoying both a sense of communion while also enjoying the uniqueness of each voice in solos, duets and trios of interpersonal harmony.

So too an attuned couple therapist responds intuitively by harmonising with the tonal centre, fundamental frequency, timbre, idiom, and melodic modality of the couple. Emotional disharmony is expressed through acoustic disharmony: dissonant overtones created by a voice that yells, rasps, barks, growls or explodes in anger. Different emotional states have their acoustic correlates. Passive emotions, such as depression, sadness and despair, tend to feature low, mumbling, monotone, and smaller pitch range. Anxiety tends to be communicated with a higher pitch, shallow breathy sound and rapid tempo. In heightened arousal, such as rage, voices may become shrill, loud, disjointed, harsh and discordant.

Sudden shifts in paralinguistic content from melodious attunement to monotone, lowpitched or harsh-toned shouting may also alert the therapist to the activation of what I call the interlocking traumatic scene (Pickering, 2006, 2008, 2011). Due to the complex interaction of unconscious factors dictating partner choice, shared unconscious phantasies (Bannister & Pincus, 1965) and mutual projective identifications operating between couples, there is often an interpenetration of relational traumata, and unresolved complexes stemming from childhood. This entanglement tends to manifest as an encrypted, repetitive and destructively volatile relational dynamic based on pathological projective identifications, namely the “interlocking traumatic couple scene”, which I shall outline more fully through the case vignette and discussion below.

Therapy as an acoustic resonating chamber

In couple therapy, while listening deeply to one partner, the therapist not only simultaneously resonates with the other partner, but attunes with a “third ear” to the relationship itself as a third entity. There are multi-faceted arrays of transferential and countertransferential foci to attend to. Of theoretical relevance is Bannister and

Pincus’s (1965) concept of “shared unconscious phantasy”, Morgan’s concept of “the couple state of mind” (2018), the intersubjective relational third (Pickering, 2006,

2008), and Britton’s (1998) theories concerning triangular space.

Couple vignette: Ildikó and James

 In the following I describe how a couple, Ildikó and James,^[4] arrived for their first session.

The rasp of a rusty gate announces the arrival of a couple for their first therapy session. I hear the murmur of their voices – a tentative, baritone: “Are you sure this is the right place?”

An angry, strident alto retorts: “Of course it is, you idiot!”

Heavy footsteps pound up the steps, then a staccato hammering of the doorknocker. Behind this, a monotone whimper, “Nothing I do is right.”

I open the door to a woman standing defiantly on the threshold. She is dressed in a bright red frock, a mop of unruly red curls cascading down her back and an array of brightly coloured bangles tinkling as she moves. Peering past her, I glimpse a thin and stooped man, dressed in grey, hovering hesitantly by the gate as if ready to depart.

“Ildikó and James? Do come in.”

Ildikó storms into the room, huffing and puffing, bangles jangling. James follows hesitantly, looking down at his shuffling feet.

Sitting on the couch, Ildikó launches forth with intonational contours ranging in pitch over two octaves.

“We are here because James has been depressed since his mother died. He’s simply withdrawn into his shell, just hiding away in his study, playing his stupid guitar. Forget intimacy, our sex life is non-existent. Go on, James, over to you:

spill the beans! Give a potted version of your history for the nice lady!” James mumbles in reply but, encouraged by my open welcoming expression and nonverbal vocal responses, his voice rises to the centre of his tonal range as he relates vital elements of his family origins.

“My family migrated from Ireland. Meant to be a new start. Came to shite all. Mum wanted a traditional family in the suburbs. But Dad was a drunk, a gambler, and gambled it all away.”

James pauses. Ildikó gently invites him to continue, matching his pitch and descending to his tonic at the end, “Go on, James.” He continues, but now with a sad undertone:

“My earliest memories were the sounds of fighting. Pots banging, doors slamming, voices raised, endless screaming matches. I cowered under the kitchen table, or fled to my room and hid under the bed. After Dad left, Mum just tried to keep up the image of the perfect home. She wasn’t there for us kids.” Ildikó chimes in, explaining how her ancestors also migrated to Australia.

“I was a second-generation migrant from Hungary: my grandparents came in 1956.”

A rasping, bitter edge creeps into her tone as she reflects on how “we were bullied by the kids at school and I just never fitted in”.

“Same here,” says James. “I never fitted in at school either: the only thing that saved me was music. Holed up in my bedroom with my guitar.” Ildikó replies with a jubilant whoop:

“Me too! Music was my godsend! I love music, especially Gypsy Klezmer music!”

Describing her fascination for Klezmer music, Ildikó’s narration has a feisty Phrygian modal tonality, with its distinctive flattened second. She exclaims:

“Klezmer’s my style, ye-ah, ye-ah, ye-ah,” and James smiles and says,

“I so love it when you sing!”

Ildikó replies, “I love it when you play!”

Despite different personalities and musical modes of expression, Ildikó and James had more in common than at first met the eye. Both their families of origin suffered intergenerational histories of displacement, migration and resettlement. Their parents focussed on physical and economic survival, yet not so able to also provide emotional attunement vital to psychological flourishing. Both feeling in different ways emotionally neglected, Ildikó and James took refuge in music-making as a means for solace and emotional expression.

Ildikó goes on to describe with joyful gusto how they had met:

“We came together through music! At a pub where James was playing guitar. I loved how reflective he seemed, so gentle and poetic. Nice change from my chaotic, loud-mouthed family!”

James describes how he was so attracted to Ildikó’s vivacity:

“You were drop-dead gorgeous and so full of passion! You were dancing on the tables to boot!”

I wondered if these idealistic first impressions of each other signalled the developmental aspects of their marital fit. Did James represent a capacity for selfcontainment, emotional regulation and reflective capacity for Ildikó? Perhaps Ildikó’s passionate nature had the potential for James to become more expressive, extroverted and relational? As James describes his first impressions of Ildikó, it is as if her extraverted personality is “rubbing off” on him, a rising emotional aliveness shown in twinkling eyes, and a more melodious, ebullient vocal contour. Then, as suddenly, it subsides into a tuneless, melancholic monotone:

“But there was more going on behind the show. Little did I know what I was getting myself into.”

In response, Ildikó’s sing-song appreciation of their first meeting also reverts to a sardonic tone of cynical suspicion.

“It takes two to tango. The romantic image of the gentle folk-singer was all show and no substance… Like so many poets, James is a depressive!”

Aware of how much air-play Ildikó seems to demand, and how quickly James retreats into a melancholic space of despair, I feel a sense of coercion to prompt him to speak.

When he does tentatively join in with Ildikó, he is acutely sensitive to any indication of non-attunement. If I fail to encourage him to continue by non-verbal minimal responses that are fine-tuned to his tonality, James trails off, descending to a mumbled undertone:

“Not sure why I bothered to open my mouth. What’s the point? No one ever listens.” I intone a falling glissando: “Oh … we are both listening, do go on.”

 From cacophony to improvised harmony

Very gradually, through the containment of couple therapy and growing awareness of their unconscious mutual projective identifications, James and Ildikó became more able to disentangle themselves from the cacophonous disharmony of their destructive interlocking scenes. Curiosity emerged in place of suspicion and mistrust, vulnerability in place of defensiveness, improvisation in place of encrypted traumatic scripts, and openness in place of suspicious hostility, all leading to co-creative improvisations of couple intimacy. Resounding the harmonic overtones of their duets, a new relational trio began to emerge, that of the relationship itself as a third. The therapeutic space increasingly functioned as an acoustic resonating chamber, amplifying and resounding the love songs of James and Ildikó.

Part Two. The acoustic resonating chamber

The acoustic resonating chamber has its origin in the womb. A foetus, immersed in the amniotic sound bath (Anzieu, 1979), hears sounds as vibrations across the amniotic fluid and is able to distinguish its mother’s voice from about 22 weeks (Powers & Trevarthen, 2009, p. 214). Maiello suggests that the foetus’s movements are “accompanied by the song of the mother’s voice, which reaches the unborn child in the amniotic bath, immersed in the ongoing rhythmical pulsating sound of her breathing and heartbeat” (Maiello, 2000, p. 69). Grier describes how the womb forms “a highly variegated sonic space”, the foetus merging “with these musical sounds”, yet also separate while also “in relationship with” the music of the maternal sonic sound bath. The trauma of birth represents a potential loss of “musical merger or nondifferentiation, and a universal craving may arise to re-find the music of that primal merger” (Grier, 2019, p. 835).

Ideally the mother mediates the baby’s entry into the world outside the womb with her welcoming arms, her gaze, her breasts and her voice:

Imagine the emergence of your baby from your womb. You coax your little one into the world with your voice. The baby takes its first breath, cries, and is placed on your chest. Heartbeat synchronises with heartbeat, as the infant feels the rise and fall of your breath, your voice reverberating through the chest cavity just as once it was transmitted and heard through the vibrations in the amniotic fluid. There is a vibrational continuity from being in the womb to being placed upon it: the marsupial pouch of your embodied living, breathing, empathic attunement and skin-to-skin contact. The baby so soothed, is then put to the breast: mouth to nipple, drinking in your milk, all the while stroked and soothed with voice and arms. Baby’s mouth falls off the nipple and she gazes up at you, a lopsided smile on her lips (Pickering, 2015, p. 628).

So too, a father may also serve to “kangaroo” a premature baby, holding the tiny neonate against his body, skin to skin, heartbeat to heartbeat. The little one resounds a little cry, and instinctively father echoes this unique cry. The baby finds a lovingly resonant welcome into the world. Neonates distinguish timing patterns, pitch, loudness, harmonic interval and voice quality. Engaging in two-way vocalic exchanges they anticipate, echo, imitate and amplify each other’s vocalisations, using melodic intonation, lyrical-affective expression, gestural forms, pulse, and dynamic forms of vitality (Stern, 2010), and so form pre-verbal narratives of shared emotional experience. The intricate reciprocal nature of such imitative interaction leads to

Trevarthen’s (1998) theory of “primary intersubjectivity”, and what Karen Proner (2000) calls “protomental synchrony”.

Babies are not only profoundly sensitive to a care-giver’s empathic mutuality expressed through melodious tone, rhythm and gesture, but such reciprocal, musically communicative improvisation contains the common components of both dramatic and musical structure: introduction (theme), development, climax, and resolution. Imitation, where parent and baby imitate each other’s vocalese, also involves slight variations in dynamics and melody, the variations being the precursor of adult dialogue. As Donald Meltzer shows, our inner world, our emotional states of mind, continue to be communicated through this song and dance level, which is the also the locus of symbol formation (Meltzer, 1986, p. 181).

 Recapitulations and development of themes: love duets and cacophonies of the interlocking traumatic scene

 Such musicality, embedded in early infant-parent encounters, is also found in the “love songs” of the adult couple. As we saw with Ildikó and James, when adult couples engage in states of intersubjective intimacy, they feel a sense of communion while enjoying the uniqueness of each “voice” in duets of interpersonal harmony. Dialogue features melodious vocal contours and rhythm, and flows easily, becoming faster when hitting rapids of joyful emotional excitement, and slower when the couple are more reflective. Such musical duets of intimacy show the couple have the capacity to be spontaneous, playful, as well as reflective, trusting, and vulnerable.

However, harmonious duets all too often morph into dissonant cacophony. Couples like Ildikó and James seek couple therapy as they suffer a seemingly intractable, repetitive, and destructive marital scene. They unwittingly entrap each other into playing a prescribed role in each other’s unconscious psychological drama, with multiple roles for each antagonist. Partners bring to a relationship their respective “malignant dowries”, consisting of unconscious unresolved traumatic material from the past. The dowry box releases its nefarious contents to create an entangled interpersonal drama, that of the interlocking traumatic scene. The defensive system of each individual dovetails together, deadlocking in such a way as to exert a “malignant third” presence, militating against psychological growth and learning from experience.

Ildikó and James both projected split-off, undeveloped aspects of themselves into each other. Ildikó was initially attracted to the image of a singer-poet whose quieter reflective nature represented a developmental choice. She feared that if she let her guard down she would be attacked, so it was hard to draw on her own reflective capacity. Instead this was often replaced with a loud, jangly, defiant tonality: such as when she made her entrance into my consulting room. Yet a loud melodically expressive tonality does not have to equate with aggression! Ildikó’s passionate feisty verve was an invitation to James to develop his own denied yearning, to be more emotionally expressive. In his family of origin, loud dynamics were equated with his parent’s screaming matches, which he avoided by hiding under the table or retreating to his bedroom, where he soothed himself with playing the guitar.

There were also intergenerational dimensions. For Ildikó’s ancestors who migrated to Australia after experiencing the uprisings of the 1956 revolution in Hungary, to be passive, weak and vulnerable was experienced as dangerous. James’s parents were also migrants to Australia. Hopeful expectations of a new start in the new land came to “shite all” in James’s words. James made himself invisible and inaudible when in public, expressing his inner “song-and-dance” with an imagined other, from the safety of a psychic retreat. Just as he had unknowingly carried his parents’ abject disappointment about the failure of their new start in the Promised Land, so now the flattened second of Ildikó’s Phrygian tonality was rubbing off on him, flattening him further by the burden of carrying for both of them.^[5] As Karen Proner observed in her discussion of this paper, James represented “the flattened unwanted part of Ildikó”. Similarly Ildikó held “the lively, passionate, manic defence, such splitting and projective identification being played out in the clinical moment” described above.

Therapeutic responsiveness to the interlocking traumatic scene

Awareness of a sudden shift in the paralinguistic vocal content of a couple’s communication from melodious attunement to low-pitched, or harsh-toned shouting alerts the couple therapist that an interlocking traumatic scene has been triggered, and helps tune appropriate therapeutic responses. For example, rather than imitate the fast tempo and rapid shallow breathing of an anxious couple, the therapist models emotional regulation through breathing that is slow and deep, with calming, gentle vocal glissandos. In place of the harsh dissonance and screaming matches of a row, the therapist likewise tones things down so that the couple may be more able to reflect on what is going on at an unconscious level.

When a couple are plunged back into the constricted zone of interlocking traumatic scenes, there are distinctive psychoacoustic as well as linguistic changes.

Their conversation may become monotone, drop in pitch, become louder. Breathing will tend to be constricted, shallow, fast, and irregular, expressing anxiety and confusion. Escalating intake and expulsion may accompany emotional dysregulation. In states of despair and depression, voices may drop and become monotone, fragmented and constricted, with acoustically dissonant interference in subliminally sensed overtones. Enunciation may become slower, softer, trailing away, mumbled, under the breath, and constricted: as it did for James.

In states of heightened arousal such as rage, the couple’s voices may become shrill and higher pitched, as it often did for Ildikó. A denigrating utterance may also be rasping, grinding, and choppy, as if vocally replicating hitting and punching. Linguistically, in place of the improvised nature of harmonious communion, the couple’s communication tends to take the form of a well-worn script in which no discrepant information can enter. It becomes encrypted, repetitive, and defensive, as Meares (2000) shows when describing the features of the traumatic memory system. There is an absence of a capacity for reflective awareness, symbolic function, or an ability to form links between past experiences and present circumstances. There is little capacity for learning from experience, an absence of curiosity about the other’s perspective, or heteropathic empathy.

The words “never” and “always” signify how in a traumatic memory system time stands still; there is little room to move, or little possibility of change. Additionally the words “never” or “always” are emphasised with louder emphasis and lower tone:  “Ildikó never listens. She always has to have the last word.”

Awareness that an interlocking scene has been activated enables more finely-tuned interpretations that may lead eventually to what I call “the conjoint selected fact” (Pickering, 2006, 2008, 2011). Here I am drawing on Bion’s analytic application of

Poincaré’s ‘Selected Fact’, and applying it to couple work (Bion, 1963, Poincaré, 1952).  The conjoint selected fact refers to how the selected facts pertaining to each partner cohere to create a third thing

It is not enough to uncover a central core of the psychic material of one partner. It is how this selected fact interacts with the central truth of the other partner’s material.  The process of intuiting a conjoint selected fact may involve uncovering networks of links between four layers of history lying behind the present conflict: the current relational situation, the couple’s marital history, internalisations of family-of-origin relational experiences, and intergenerational traumatic matters cross-transmitted in the current relationship.

This is a little like a kaleidoscope, where numerous split-off fragments of coloured glass begin to cohere, where the disparate elements of unconscious and conscious material in each partner and in the couple, the past dynamics, traumatic material, interlocking scenes and current dynamics, all seem to find their place in the whole.  There is often considerable pressure on the couple therapist to offer premature solutions. Often one person thinks they know what their partner’s problems are and want to “pip” the therapist at the interpretative “post” with pathologising interpretations.

Ildikó announces, “My therapist wonders why you haven’t addressed the fact that

James is insecure-avoidant, passive aggressive, and that’s why our sex life is lousy!”  It is not until such time as the therapist has got to the heart of what is going on, in the intrapsychic system of each partner as well as how this  interlocks in their intersubjective relational field and so uncovering a central conjoint “selected fact” that sublates all these dimensions, that the therapist is in a position to make a mutative interpretation.

 Conclusion

Layers of emotional meaning are transmitted through paralinguistic channels of communication between a couple. We can decipher such meaning through analysing musical fundaments of the couple’s communication such as: pitch, tonality, timbre, rhythm, melodic contour, tone-set, musical structures such as alternating turn-taking question-answer sequences, cadences, dissonance, cacophony, unison, duets, polyphony, whether their voices are shouting, raspy, breathy, growling, under the breath, disjointed, monotone and so forth.

There are specific psychoacoustic markers indicating whether a couple are immersed in a state of creative interpersonal relatedness, or triggered into interlocking traumatic scenes. Interpersonal harmony tends to be expressed with more joyful sing-song, tuneful tonality which is improvisatory, featuring question-answer and theme-andvariation musical forms. The tonality may have modal elements expressive of a partner’s true self, and may echo folk-music traditions of country of origin. When a couple are catapulted into an interlocking scene, the tonal features of their dialogue changes. It may become monotone, disjointed, harsh, fragmented, dissonant, drop in pitch or become louder, such as yelling and shouting. Finer analysis may identify specific emotional states: depression, anger, dissociation all have their characteristic acoustic features. A sudden shift to disjointed, low-pitched, harsh-toned and monotone utterances alerts the couple therapist that a sudden change has taken place in the couple’s emotional state. This also helps the couple therapist attune appropriate therapeutic responsiveness.

 Coda

Couple therapy ideally functions to provide a resonating chamber in which the therapist’s interpretations, like musical interludes, disrupt rather than reinforce stuck monotonous drones or angry cacophonous marital scenes. Like a conductor, the therapist’s gentle interpretive gestures beckon the couple to lay aside their overrehearsed, repetitively destructive set pieces, inviting them to try out new forms of improvisation, to compose new and unique symphonies of love.

---

 References

Anzieu, D. (1979). The Sound Image of the Self. International Review of Psychoanalysis, 6, 23-36.

Bannister, K. & Pincus, L. (1965). Shared Phantasy in Marital Problems: Therapy in a Four-person Relationship. London: Institute of Marital Studies.

Bion, W. R. (1963). Elements of Psycho-Analysis. London: Heinemann.

Britton, R. (1998). Belief and Imagination: Explorations in Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

Clulow, C. (2020). Couple and Family Psychoanalysis: Special Issue: Musical Connections, 10:1.

Grier, F. (2019). Musicality in the consulting room. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 100:5, 827-851.

Maiello, S. (2000). “Song-and-dance” and its developments: the function of rhythm in the learning process of oral and written language. In M. Cohen & A. Hahn (Eds.), Exploring the Work of Donald Meltzer (pp. 68-85). London: Routledge.

Malloch, S. & Trevarthen, C. (Eds.) (2009). Communicative Musicality: Exploring the Basis of Human Companionship. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Meares, R. A. (2000). Intimacy and Alienation: Memory, Trauma and Personal Being. London: Routledge.

Meltzer, D.; Albergamo, M.; Cohen, E.; Greco, A.; Harris, M.; Maiello, S.; Milana, G.; Petrelli, D.; Rhode, M.; Sabatini Scolmati, A. & Scotti, F. (1986). Studies in Extended Metapsychology: Clinical Application of Bion’s Ideas. Perthshire: Clunie Press.

Morgan, M. (2018). A Couple State of Mind: Psychoanalysis of Couples and the Tavistock Relationships Model. London: Routledge.

Morgan, M. (2001). First contacts: the therapist’s “couple state of mind” as a factor in the containment of couples seen for initial consultations. In F. Grier (Ed.), Brief Encounters with Couples (pp. 17-32). London: Karnac.

Pickering, J. (2006). Who’s afraid of the Wolfe couple: the interlocking traumatic scene. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 51(2), 251-270.

Pickering, J. (2008). Being in Love: Therapeutic Pathways Through Psychological Obstacles to Love. London: Routledge.

Pickering, J. (2011). Bion and the couple. Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 1(1), 49-69.

Pickering, J. (2018). The Lamp of Tragedy Past. In T. Keogh & C. Gregory-Roberts (Eds.), Restoration of the Object: Mourning, Melancholia and Couples (pp. 87101). London: Routledge.

Pickering, J. (2015). Acoustic resonance at the dawn of life: musical fundamentals of the psychoanalytic relationship. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 60(5), 618641. doi: 10.1111/1468-5922.12176.

Pickering, J. (2020). Harmony of the Spheres: Musical Elements of Couple Communication. Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 10, 42-58.

Proner, K. (2000). Proto-mental synchrony: some thoughts on the earliest identification processes in a neonate. International Journal of Infant Observation, 3(2), 55-63.

Stern, D. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology. New York: Basic Books.

Trevarthen, C. (1998). The concept and foundations of infant intersubjectivity. In S.

Braten (Ed.), Studies in Emotion and Social Interaction, 2nd series. Intersubjective Communication and Emotion in Early Ontogeny (pp. 15-46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

---

[1] Previous research on this topic has been published in Pickering, J. (2020). Harmony of the Spheres: Musical Elements of Couple Communication. Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, 10, 42-58. This paper is published with the kind permission of Phoenix Publishing House. See also Pickering, J. (2015). Acoustic resonance at the dawn of life: musical fundamentals of the psychoanalytic relationship. The Journal of Analytical Psychology, 60(5), 618-641.

[2] Couple and Family Psychoanalysis, Volume 10 (Number One), edited by Christopher Clulow, is devoted to papers on musical connections in couple and family therapy.

[3] This is a vast field of research beyond the scope of this paper to refer to. See Malloch & Trevarthen (2009).

[4] All names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect anonymity.

[5] I owe a debt of gratitude for this observation to Karen Proner, who was the discussant of this paper at the conference.