ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the possible importance of the analyst’s pre-verbal communications and their relation to his or her verbal conceptualization, aiming to contribute to the debate by investigating two concepts from infancy research and their application to the analytic dialogue. It deals with the importance of matching, especially in infantile amodal perception. The chapter attempts to portray some possible attunements in analysis by means of doggerel; aiming to illustrate the existence of underlying analytic rhythms over time. It suggests that mother-infant attunement might be a model for aspects of the analytic process. Amodality is an abstraction and seems likely to be a root of higher abstract thought processes. It may thus be needed in the future armoury of the psychologist or psychoanalyst concerned with the theory of thinking. Poetry and music have been hitherto been largely missing from psychoanalytic discourse, and preverbal gesture and intonation has tended to remain unstudied and ill-conceptualized.
