Expanding the talking cure into the preverbal domain

Reviews the book, Psychoanalytic Therapy With Infants and Parents: Practice, Theory and Results by Björn Salomonsson (see record 2014-02309-000). This book challenges clinicians of all theoretical stripes (but especially psychoanalysts) to expand their appreciation of the talking cure in at least two directions. The first direction is developmental: Salomonsson provides illustrations of effective psychoanalytic work with infants during the first months of life. The second direction has to do with Salomonsson’s understanding of the importance of nonverbal (and especially preverbal) aspects of mental life that continue to resonate in clinical work with patients across all ages. In Psychoanalytic Therapy With Infants and Parents: Practice, Theory and Results, Salomonsson makes the case that mental life is built upon foundations that precede the advent of words. Consequently, effective clinical work requires careful attunement to mental representations that are both preverbal and nonverbal. Salomonsson’s writing is clear, elegant, and engaging. He draws from fields as varied as clinical work with infants, several veins of psychoanalytic theory, the philosophy of language, developmental psychology, and neuropsychoanalysis, as well as Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Readers are in for a bit of vigorous mental exercise, but will find the effort worthwhile, and will find that their own conceptions of the talking cure have expanded. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)