The influence of words

Second communication of the 2nd International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology held in Paris from 11 to 14 May 1972, presented by Mademoiselle Frédérique Gesta, of the Audio-Psycho-Phonology Service of the Centre Hospitalier de Villeneuve-Saint-Georges. Starting from the fascination that the word has always exerted on man, Mlle Gesta questions the two faces of the linguistic sign in the sense of Ferdinand de Saussure — the signifier (acoustic image, phonic envelope, frequencies) and the signified (semantic content) — and considers the psychological repercussions of words on the autistic or dyslexic child undergoing treatment under Electronic Ear. There follows a dense discussion, chaired by Mr Baltz (Lyon), in which Professor Tomatis, Mme Dubard (Nice), Mme Bourgnon (Verviers), Mme Zillermairi (Lyon) and Mlle Gesta herself intervene: choice of texts for recording by the mothers, the mother’s voice, maternal anxiety, sibilants, whistled languages, and what Tomatis calls the “Labdacos stage” — after the name of the father of Laius — in which the child finds again the desire to move his lips to express himself.

by Mademoiselle Frédérique Gesta
Audio-Psycho-Phonology Service
Centre Hospitalier de Villeneuve-Saint-Georges

From time immemorial, the word has fascinated man, who has accorded to it a magical virtue; the mere fact of naming a thing, of pronouncing the name of someone, was thought to have a decisive influence on that thing or that person.

In the same way the very young child, after a “pre-linguistic” period (with cries), a period of “babbling” (with cooing), then a “pre-verbal” period (in which he repeats the phonemes he hears), finally accedes to a “linguistic” stage at which he comes to understand that certain sounds have a meaning for those around him. He notices that the word permits the appearance of the object of his desires; “The word is a means of making the thing present”, as Wallon tells us. The child still confuses the word and the object, or the word and the situation; it is the word-sentence that has a plurality of senses: “Mummy” will mean as much “I am hungry … I want to play … I want to kiss you …”. Only gradually does he establish a correspondence between a single object and a single word. It is moreover thanks to the evolution of the symbolic function of language that the child’s thought is forged.

For us, adults, words have become for us so to speak “utilitarian” vehicles to translate our thoughts, our emotions, to accompany our acts. It is only when we seek to influence, to capture the attention of our interlocutor, that words recover their full value; we “weigh our words” in order to “have the last word”; a well-placed word can thus do more harm than many a fist-blow.

Since our role, in the “Language Centres”, is to call forth the desire to communicate, which has never been elaborated in the autistic child, or which finds difficulty in passing from the oral to the written stage in the dyslexic, it is important to lean over the word, over its possible repercussions, over the way in which we can best use it in our therapy. Indeed, it is observed that, in recording maternal voices, mothers find difficulty, if not blockages, in choosing texts, in saying them aloud … It appeared to us, after a certain time, that there is a whole approach to be suggested, by proposing a kind of dialogue likely to interest their child. Very often, these recordings are revealing of father-child relations: “I said that to tell him”, we hear; the choice of texts for the M.V. is all the more important as this dialogue is increasingly being practised, in the Centres, through the technique of the Sonic Birth, in which the child, in late pregnancy, is intended to hear the story being told to him. The choice for the P.V. (paternal voice) must likewise be careful, since the child will listen to it, who knows, for several months.

Mention should also be made of the choice of books to be proposed during reading sessions; such as that young schizophrenic to whom a novel with sordid play-scenes was being read, and the session had to be interrupted as he repeated under his breath, “oh ! the pigs …”. Particular attention must therefore be paid to the words to be avoided, for example sibilants, which will be our subject.

It is from the definition of the linguist de Saussure that we shall question the influence of the word.

In his celebrated Course in General Linguistics, de Saussure defines the word for us as a conventional sign, decomposing it into a “signified”, that is to say the semantic content, the sense, and a “signifier”, the container, the acoustic image.

If one is interested first in the “signified”, in the semantic content, one realises that it triggers, by its sense, reactions of refusal, of fear for instance, or the necessity to repeat such and such a mode. The fact is liable to have, by its semantic aspect, psychological repercussions, whether in an adult or a child, at the idea of a word evoking a painful reality, which will have all the more repercussion when it evokes a traumatic memory. At the extreme, one may be faced with a certain “blockage” before having the syllables repeated, an expression meaningful enough to release oneself from any affective incidence. That is where the notion of interest, of motivation, comes in: indeed, attention must be sustained, otherwise the child must feel concerned. In reality, they regain their respective familiarity. The child, to feel concerned, must find again his frames of reference, such as that veil that one would have him evoke “chocolate”, his saintly role, one will hear him say “patatatat” … his voice rising shrill to the point of answering: “tatata, I have nothing to say to him. I do not see why I should speak to him now, when we never speak to each other at home …”. If words are not loaded with affective notations, the child reacts fairly secured, like the elderly lady who said at the end of the session, “I understood your dictation by heart; I could interrupt you and you can, it seems to me, do it.” What may interest the poor child is that his mother speaks to him, that she dialogues with him, that she tells him something, anything, but in a soft and soothing voice.

Faced with such an attitude of opposition, of aggressiveness on the mother’s part, we therefore decided to have her read a text for half an hour. But she must still be offered something worthwhile, positive, a tale composed of words expressing feelings of gentleness, of serenity, proposing an agreeable affective climate, without shock, without violence. All this will think the child’s unconscious not to touch the child where he has remained painfully fixed. The influence of words, as one feels, makes itself felt even and sometimes especially in the unconscious. That is why we must take great care in the choice of texts for the recordings of the maternal voice.

Later in the programming, when the M.V. and the A.S. are completed, we sometimes ask mothers of fairly handicapped children to record while singing, with soft sonorities, the few words pronounced by the child. And from this sonic warp, we amplify the number of words by counting some from time to time. It is advantageous to use as often as possible the mother’s voice, especially when the latter has already begun a number of filtered music sessions. She then has a voice that is more timbred, more modulated and, in addition, her behaviour towards the child has changed greatly. She is ready to communicate with him.

As for the voice from which texts are recorded for the mutages, it is likewise necessary to take precautions and to analyse it on a sonograph in order to know the distribution of the harmonic parts, in particular when it is a question of recording sibilants. We now do this automatically, especially since our adventure with our Benedictine. A priori we thought she had a swallowed voice, non-aggressive, full of delicacy. But that was not the case, and it is certainly not without reason that the Father Abbot had asked us to take her at the Language Centre for a certain time. Our method had to have certain fullness and pose a few of them within the Community.

It is now possible, with the help of apparatuses, to reach the physical nature of the word, that is to say the various parameters that define sound: pitch, timbre, duration, to which intensity can be associated. Thus one can photograph, either with the sonograph or with the phono-integrator, where one obtains on a screen an envelope curve of the frequencies contained in such and such a word, by the lighting of coloured bulbs.

Chassagny uses, in his method of re-education of language disorders, the two aspects of the word. In what he calls “series”, he will isolate words and ask the child to establish associations of both form and sense, for example, for the word “écureuil”, he will have to find a whole series of words in “euil” (the form) and another of words related to this animal (the sense). It is after recovering the possibility of using words in their proper value that he will be able to construct sentences, and then a coherent story, a true language. For to read, Chassagny tells us, “is to pass directly from the signifier (written representation) to the signified (idea)”.

What matters to us are the frequencies likely to provoke a cortical recharge, that is to say the highs. We shall therefore choose words rich in high frequencies, hence sibilants.

One may then wonder whether it is the value of the word, its semantic charge, or its richness in high frequencies, that is the most important thing. Is it the physiological action of the highs? Or the psychological action of the meaning of the words? If the semantics provokes anxiety, that is the opposite of what we wish to obtain, by excitation of the vagal nerve.

It seems however that the problem does not lie at this level. While we must obviously take care not to choose words liable to revive violent affects, for fear of reducing the benefit of the highs, perhaps it should chiefly be of concern whether the voice of the one who will say the words will have a favourable impact. Indeed, we know that a left, monotonous voice, without quality, without timbre, depresses, while a right, frank, assured voice, hence rich in high frequencies, recharges.

Not to rely entirely on the technique, however important its influence, but to take into account, during recordings of all kinds, the interests, the motivations of each — that is what our role must be.

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Discussion of Mlle Gesta’s paper (Villeneuve)

on “The Influence of Words”

Debate chaired by Mr Baltz (Lyon)

Mr Baltz

I think the subject set out by the speaker was very clear, and I shall allow myself to sum it up in two words, namely that any information involves both a frequential problem and a semantic problem. That is plain, and I think one could broaden the question a little to include dyslexia. There is information of various orders and information of an acoustic order, since, as Prof. Tomatis tells us in his book Éducation et Dyslexie, it is the junction, the coordination of these two categories that will make reading easy or difficult. According to the concordance of vision and audition, greater or lesser delays will be introduced, and we shall thus have either stumblings, suppressions of syllables, or inversions.

That small reservation made, I shall not keep the floor any longer, so as to give it to whoever wishes it in the room.

Prof. Tomatis

If you will allow me, since no one is yet asking for the floor, I should like to add a few details to what Mlle Gesta has presented. What she reports about that nun who spoke of her little Jesus each time she was made to hear sibilants she did not understand, is all the more striking for us as Mlle Gesta is surely alluding to a problem we had to resolve about some of our recordings.

These were made at one point from texts containing very negative words, chosen — and that is the paradox — by an at least Benedictine person who was then with us in our services. Without meaning to, we had reproduced, chance has had it that. So that we now have, after two and a half years, and thanks to spectral analysis under Electronic Ear, certain situations very much linked to emotionally charged words. Very rapidly, curves thus of dreadful words like “suicide”, “cinema”, “divorce” … made with a recto-tono voice into the bargain, in short enough to give you pause before leaving the cabin.

I have also seen mothers refuse to record because the very tone of the proposed text frightened them. One of them moreover had an aborted child … This idea of having to speak to children whom one psychically expected for several years, and served in a wink that the door always for her to make a new recording charged them with re-educating one of these latter children who was also dyslexic. He had indeed been offered a text of such violence, with frightful, dreadful words, that she had refused to read it, on the pretext that he did not want to say in front of his child even so dismal a tale. She was right.

It is necessary indeed to attend to the quality and value of the text the mother is going to record for training in intra-uterine voice. The text must be well chosen, harmoniously composed, full of hope and tenderness. Some children’s tales are to be recommended. Why then do so many mothers reach for narratives that will be filtered above 6,000 Hz, which most of the time seems hardly comprehensible, like the child (every word apart from the semantic aspect)? Because, in the child’s unconscious, what is said is taken to its maximum value and its maximum bursting power. The mother’s text, moreover, may be interpreted by him in accordance with his preoccupations. A boy of 11, for example, although persecuted and very receptive to what is recorded for him, will declare he had said “thief” or “vodapeur”, quite simply because the day before he had taken something from his mother’s purse to go shopping and was not entirely comfortable about it. It is a smiling text, in the course of the small tale of the M.V., that revealed the unconscious blocking the child in his becoming. That is also why it is important to note the impressions of the subject during M.V. and intra-uterine listening sessions.

Mr Baltz

If you will, I shall allow myself to broaden a little the question of information I raised earlier. I was speaking of the problem of cerebral palsy, in connection with the work we do to provide them with a considerable re-education that we have been able to observe after a year of psycho-motor re-education; we have however noticed that children who presented motor disorders kept problems of coordination, of muscular slowness which, without being motor handicaps as such, were great handicaps.

It is rather curious to see, under Electronic Ear, the encounter these pupils were able to make in relation to language. It is there that we find the problem of the semantic supply; I think the two are closely linked — perhaps the Doctor will be able to explain to us in a moment. I consider that these two factors are sufficiently linked in the case to which I have referred several times, concerning subjects who had a maxillary articular lesion, with phonotype obviously perturbed in the case where maxillary rectification was provided for to re-establish the dentition.

Now, after a year of having benefited from sessions under Electronic Ear for problems of oral and written language, it was found that there was no longer any need for orthodontia. The ear had done the work, that is to say that the muscularisation brought to the maxillo-facial sphere had energetically replaced the bridle of action that the device was to set up. You see thus the relations this may entail from the phonatory and from the acoustic control point of view. I think the Doctor is much better placed than I to speak of this and to specify the hypotonia of the maxillo-facial sphere as it will be found in the musculature of the stirrup.

Mme Zillermairi (Lyon)

How many sessions were required to obtain these results?

Mr Baltz

About a hundred.

Prof. Tomatis

Mr Baltz is right to specify that if the child is hypotonic, the whole musculature that opens the ear is also hypotonic, and we shall have counter-reactions acting on the VIIth pair, which innervates the hammer muscles and the stirrup nerve. We thus have a cycle as well between the musculature of the face and the stirrup muscle; through auditory education under Electronic Ear, you reinforce at the same time the whole maxillo-facial musculature, which will improve the couplings effected at once on the receiver and the emitter.

To return to the Saussurean system Mlle Gesta spoke of, I judge it is needed to insist on the fact that one must not consider language as an object in itself, I mean currently Honorary of linguistics. Language is the secretion of the individual, and the very human is always a being who thinks. If, therefore, one gives him linguistic structures so that he can express what he has to say, he will have to fashion this language in his own way and retransmit it through his body, in order to be able to express his thought.

I do not believe that language is an essentially social phenomenon, but also a problem of inscription of the being. Some, among the Ancients, who studied language — the Kabbalists for instance — knew very well that the choice of words is of capital importance, that one cannot pull someone out of, or on the contrary tone him up, through language by choosing the frequencies and their distribution. These specific frequencies and their non-determined signification — what concerns us is that sibilants bring an extraordinary energy, amplified further by successive filterings. It is true that there may also slip in a sneering word which, for its part, will destroy more the energising side. The devil can be humanised in his whole. That said, I think that the technique we use is simply made to stretch the eardrum; we shall speak of this again tomorrow. If the eardrum is very stretched, anxiety falls. From the moment the subject no longer has anxiety, he ceases to be born anew to himself, hence to choose the words by which he will express himself.

In the domain of audio-vocal education we practise under Electronic Ear, frequencies are therefore very important. If you record for us, for example, a soft, gentle, tender word, words made of “banana”, “lemon”, “danelot”, you will undo the entire verticality of the subject and you will not be able to reach the zone of painting, of abstraction, of transcendence. If on the contrary you choose words very rich in sibilants, you will strongly increase the constancy of the subject, who will thus be able to give more and more on the plane of expression.

Mme Dubard (Nice)

I should like to know what you think of a child who does not speak at three years of age but whistles.

Prof. Tomatis

That is a language. There exist whistled languages, in the Pyrenees for example, where shepherds “speak” to each other from one valley to another by whistling. On a certain coast of Spain, people call out to each other in this way. There is a coding entirely, but one that does not go very far on the plane of expression. The child you speak of is capable of entering language at three to express himself, refuses no doubt his entry into language and requires of his parents that they behave so as to convey what he wishes to say, and I am sure the parents respond to his questions, especially the mother. So why would he change? Furthermore, it is also for him a means of recharging himself and ridding himself of his anxiety. You have no doubt been taken with fright at night, when you started whistling or singing to break the silence and increase your level of consciousness in order to eliminate the anxiety that was invading you. Whenever the unknown brings back the dread of fear, one must hold up its tonality. The one who starts whistling at night does so sympathetically. By whistling, he stretches his eardrum and thus calms the action of the parasympathetic-pneumogastric, which is, as you know, the nerve of anxiety. By whistling, one also tries to recharge oneself, to prove to oneself that one exists. You remember that, to exist, one must touch oneself; and the language we emit from the mouth is one of the principal elements allowing us to touch ourselves, precisely by the auricular of the skin. As soon as you set the surrounding air in motion by making noise, you set into vibration objects that come and touch your skin and calm you.

In the case raised by Mme Dubard, it is no doubt a child who has important communication disorders, who cannot enter into the language of others. He whistles in order not to enter the language of relation. He whistles in order not to be in the language of others; this, moreover, allows him to recharge himself. I think he is not so much an autistic as a schizophrenic; the autistic cuts communication entirely — then the whistle; while the schizo has never cut himself off in the language of totality but has kept an ear extremely rich in highs. That is why he has such energy; he climbs the walls, he climbs the furniture, he always has energy, and when he does not whistle, he cries very loudly, whereas the autistic remains entirely silent. He does not even use this code of communication.

Mme Bourgnon (Verviers)

Could one not envisage in this regard making tapes with sibilants?

Prof. Tomatis

Yes, of course, and then broaden the whistling in frequencies on both sides, towards the lows and towards the highs. But it must be remarked that the whistle does not turn very high. You will be able to observe it on oscilloscopes: you go much higher by whistling than by speaking; in fact it does not exceed 4,000 Hz, so the zone is limited.

Mme Bourgnon

Personally, I have whistled a great deal because it did me good.

Prof. Tomatis

It was no doubt also to flee language. I note in passing that when one loses hearing, one also loses the whistle, and re-education will consist, by recovering a certain zone of the highs, in giving the subject again the desire to whistle. In his unconscious, he begins to activate his lips, and that is what I have called the “Labdacos” stage. You remember that Labdacos was the father of Laius or Laïos; it is the stage at which the child begins to move his lips in order to be able to express himself. He wishes to become master of this process, master of the counter-reaction: hearing in the highs — tension of the eardrum — tension of the lips forward; this is what will replace the sucking phenomenon of the beginning.

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Source: Actes du II^e Congrès International d’Audio-Psycho-Phonologie, Paris, 11-14 May 1972, pp. 21-31 (“L’influence des mots” by Mlle Frédérique Gesta, Audio-Psycho-Phonology Service of the Centre Hospitalier de Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, followed by the discussion chaired by Mr Baltz, Lyon, with interventions by Prof. Alfred Tomatis, Mme Dubard (Nice), Mme Bourgnon (Verviers) and Mme Zillermairi (Lyon)). Document digitised from the personal archives of Alfred Tomatis. The original text, typewritten, presents many imperfections of input; we have transcribed it as close as possible to the source document, restoring punctuation and typography whenever reading permitted, and signalling by implicit [sic] doubtful readings.