ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates how the analyst's rhythms of attention between formed symbolic communication and the processes of formation on acoustic and kinesthetic registers can enrich the texturing of meaning constructed in analytic interaction. The process of improvisation in jazz requires careful attention to nonverbal embodied dimensions of communication, particularly rhythm, tone, and gesture, for recognizing and expressing affect. The rhythms of 'eye dialogue' were quick and nervous, starting and stopping like the twists and turns that Bartok would command in his compositions, or Cecil Taylor would explode in his piano improvisations. The registers of experience require new and different kinds of attentional strategies that can be useful in psychoanalytic practice. Interestingly, Steven Knoblauch had never attended to Denise's moans with analytic curiosity. Denise, often depleted and hopeless in these states of uncertainty and hypervigilance, would speak of her sense of failure and inability to feel as if she were measuring up to anything in her professional growth and personal life.
