Bodies and Social Rhythms: Navigating Unconscious Vulnerability and Emotional Fluidity

Abstract

As I write this, I am listening to Miles Davis’ On the Corner, a jazz ode to New York City street life just this side of dissonant. I put it on because Knoblauch’s Bodies and Social Rhythms, for all its academic rigor, is drenched in jazz and informed by the streets of New York City, both of which are all about rhythm, syncopation and the unpredictable rise and fall of affective energy, often to the exclusion of symbolic meaning. Jazz, New York City and infant research (Knoblauch co-wrote Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment with Beatrice Beebe, Knoblauch, Rustin & Sorter, 2005) comprise a kind of fluid foundation for this work, perhaps of greater importance than the more solid-seeming architecture of psychoanalysis, which tends to loom over the nonsymbolic register of experience in a superior way. Beginning in the 1970s, Daniel Stern (1985) used a video camera to record the interactions of mothers and infants, allowing for the first time a micro-, frame-by-frame analysis of what goes on in these temporally tight sequences. A world opened up of nonverbal but meaningful communication, as surprising as the world of cells and invisible organisms that came into view only after the invention of the microscope. Psychoanalysis has taken note of this “something-more-thaninterpretation” aspect of our analytic conversations but has not found a good way to describe this new knowledge. Most attempts to apply these discoveries from infant research to adult analysis have tended to rely on the abstract language of dynamic systems theory, a choice of tone that to this reader contradicts the argument for their clinical relevance. Steven Knoblauch attempts to fill that gap with his careful slow-motion descriptions of real clinical situations he has lived through rather than observed.