The Electronic Ear, an Auxiliary Technique in Psychotherapy

Communication presented at the 4^th International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology*,* Madrid, May 1974*, by* Dr Jean Sarkissoff*, Centre du Langage, Geneva (Switzerland).*

The Electronic Ear, an auxiliary technique in psychotherapy. Variations on the theme of “rebirth”.

I have been using the Electronic Ear for three years as an auxiliary technique in my psychotherapy practice, and it has appeared to me that it can in many cases play a very useful role as activator of psychotherapy. Birth fantasies — and, who knows, birth memories? — appear with quite considerable frequency, and their elaboration has seemed to me fruitful.

The original birth fantasy

Progress and Evolution proceed by trial and error — from failures to partial successes, and from errors to discoveries to be put again in question — and the joy of the temporary success rewards the pain of the work and the effort. Can one think that the birth of man might form an exception in a cosmic arrangement so evident?

To the original birth fantasy lodged in the unconscious is devolved the capital role of rendering possible all later attitudes of necessary refusal, of healthy contestation, of constructive opposition — and this throughout life. This is to say the importance of a perfect acceptance of “birth”: it forms the prototype of all the questionings necessary for progress. In the contrary case, if birth is only partially accepted, or if it is refused, a fantasy of submission, of defeat is lodged in the unconscious — which will make the bed of all later neurotic submissions before the superego.

Success, or failure, in the elaboration of all later frustrations depends on the manner in which the original birth trauma was lived.

The foetus in the uterus

The foetus finds in the uterus an atmosphere of security where it is woven and loved. It is its future love of life that is prepared in this primitive night where its first relationship to the universe is created — the one which will remain the backdrop on which all its sensory perceptions will be inscribed, throughout its life.

The soothing and anxiety-relieving action of filtered sounds comes from the fact that they are capable, by nature, of reactivating in the depths of the unconscious this primordial experience, this peaceful confidence in Life which — doubling our mother — weaves us at every instant.

The first reciprocal act of love

It is at birth, if all goes without hindrance, that the first reciprocal act of love takes place: the baby perceives its mother’s welcome and gives her its response, accepting with joy its birth. The tireless later repetition of these two facts will engrave its psyche with indelible furrows, marking its destiny. Every act of love subsequently repeats the one to which it consented at the beginning in life. But if the mother fails in her function of empathy and welcome, failing in her role of initiator into love, her child may then see in every act of love a danger leading it to abstain, throughout its life perhaps, from going towards the other in an attitude of giving.

To accept being born is to love; it is to accept a kind of death and to surmount it thanks to communication. In many myths, the theme of death meets that of love. To love is to die a little, to forget oneself for the other, and to repeat, in the depths of ourselves, our acceptance of being born.

It is the refusal to be born that makes birth become a trauma. Accepting one’s birth is an unconscious fantasy that must be realised every day.

The refusal to be born

Our daily practice teaches us that from the outset the child is capable, and with stupefying penetration, of perceiving its mother’s love for it in all its modalities. It is in communication with all those around it, and first with its mother, that its psyche will be shaped. The most vulnerable point of this learning of love is situated at birth and in the following weeks.

If this relationship of communication-with-the-world is built under the sign of love at every level — from the conscious to the deepest layers of the unconscious — mental health is solidly established. But when disturbances of the relation of love of the child with its mother and with its first objects have marked its development, neurotic fixations are constituted in the unconscious which will later provoke symptoms.

The development of the person is therefore the fruit of education, and psychotherapy must seek to realise a second edition of this same education, to erase the bad conditionings. The Tomatis treatment often brings a precious aid in psychotherapy, since, through the listening of the filtered maternal voice, it can lead the patient in the regression necessary for the remodelling of his first fixations.

To be born is at once to lose one’s mother, who is everything, and to recover her: to “die” and to “live again” — this is the lesson of the phoenix.

The patients who refuse

The psychotherapist who uses the filtered maternal voice and the sonic births with the Electronic Ear finds himself very often in a privileged situation to observe, reactivated, all the fantasies that have burdened the “birth” of patients.

Some sometimes refuse, in a systematic and obstinate manner, the totality of interventions. Although well-founded, given at the right moment and with benevolence, one has the surprise of seeing them refused with an unalterable and durable hostility — which is the transferential reproduction of the primitive refusal of the mother, from their birth, by these patients.

They have indeed kept from their birth a profound state of exasperation that prevents them from introjecting anything; everything one gives them appears to them as bad and to be refused. The state in which they found themselves at their birth, remaining repressed at the bottom of themselves, is reactivated in the transferential situation. Their mother is refused in her essential role; these patients refuse themselves, refuse their own birth. They drag along thereafter — throughout their lives — a neurotic feeling of existential malaise and a fundamental, ceaselessly frustrated characteriological claim.

The refusal of postnatal life seems indeed to translate itself, in certain cases, into a psychogenic transmission hypoacusis bearing electively on air conduction — the curve of bone listening being situated above the air curve. Such a curve was observed in a suicidal young woman in whom analysis evidenced a rupture of communication with her mother dating from her very early childhood. The treatment of psychotherapy and Electronic Ear obtained a profound transformation of the clinical picture, corroborated by the improvement of the audiometric tracing.

Shame at being born

Responsibility and self-awareness depend on the loving acceptance of the child by its mother, with whom it identifies. This feeling is at the basis of the deepest human joy. But it may be charged with intolerable moral characteristics, incompatible with the joy of living. The patients then refuse to “be born”, to be responsible, and prefer to return in fantasy to foetal irresponsibility.

The rejection by the parents — real or fantasmatic — has lodged in them the germ of a permanent moral accusation which persecutes them ceaselessly from the depths of their unconscious. These beings know not where to hide to conceal their shame at being there, present, when they believe themselves guilty of having been born. “Before being born”, they seem to say, “I had no need to hide: I was hidden!” (A reflection of this situation perhaps appears in the text of Genesis: “They discovered that they were naked and were ashamed.”)

To flee themselves, these patients often project themselves psychically into other persons with whom they try to identify, thus realising a fantasy of return to the maternal breast — by projective identification (M. Klein, Bion). Suicidal subjects may also desire a return to the maternal womb so as not to enter into life.

A case of schizoidy

A very strongly schizoid patient kept repeating to me: “I am dead… I am a dead man. My feelings are those of a dead man. I feel nothing.” The analysis showed that on the plane of unconscious fantasies, he had killed within himself everything that reminded him of his mother. His audiometry showed a significant closure to high frequencies, which could have been taken for a traumatic deafness. The treatment allowed him to recover both the audition of the high frequencies and the warmth of contact and of affective life.

I have observed on several occasions in men undergoing treatment the appearance of a considerable anxiety, coming from the fact that “being born” — and thereby healing — represented for them the brutal loss of their foetal omnipotence. These patients were then seized with an exasperation of their genital desire, and to realise the sexual act became a gigantic obsession, as powerful as the anxiety of death which it counterbalanced. Coitus then represented for these men a means of returning in fantasy into their mother and of annulling in this acting out the intolerable reality of their “birth”.

Note on other abnormal situations:

1. Flight backwards: birth is not accepted, only the uterine experience is tolerated. This is autism.

2. Flight forwards: the trauma of birth is denied. Material life is considered as the only real one by these beings whose inner life is non-existent.

3. Some patients have kept the regression-progression movement but are invaded by anxiety at every movement. Their agoraphobic anxiety corresponds to the fear of being born, and their claustrophobic anxiety, on the contrary, to the fear of returning to the original uterus.

Healing as new birth

If “birth”, which should constitute a prolongation and an enrichment of the primordial relation of the child to the universe, is lived as a trauma, this primordial perception is darkened, and anxiety takes the place of inner peace. The memory of the uterine experience and of its flawless perfection disappears; fear, anxiety, mistrust may from then on replace — and for all of life — the original peaceful faith.

To heal, and for the effects of this maleficent “caesura” to be attenuated, the patient must know himself to be understood and feel himself to be loved by his doctor. To be real and profound, healing must be accompanied by a second edition, more successful than the first, of “birth”. The Tomatis method can help us to realise it: to begin one’s life again in profound liaison with the confident, passive serenity of what was the uterine stage.

Mental health consists in being able to travel freely, in both senses — regressive and progressive — through the central event of our life that is our “birth”. There results from it a solid anchoring in reality.

The patients regain life

When they regain life thanks to the treatment, our patients sometimes observe that they begin to dream, which they did not do before. It is also at this moment of their treatment that they discover their inner world and become capable of introspection.

I have heard several patients who slept enormously before the treatment complain and rejoice at the same time at no longer “living to sleep” as before. “My sleep is being taken from me!”, said one of them, astonished at no longer desiring to indulge in an atemporal uterine regression. Another was seized with anxiety when she became aware, after a few sessions, that time was passing — which awakened the depressive feeling of loss that she had not been able to elaborate, that had marked her early childhood and that she had denied at the same time as her “birth”.

The listening of the filtered maternal voice and of the sonic births ordinarily awakens in the patient an unconscious fantasy according to which his mother makes him recover the love she has for him — that love of which his “birth” had made him doubt and had caused him to lose the memory: resuming the love that he finds again, he can at last reconcile himself with life.

One of the most appreciable effects of the Electronic Ear treatment is the reinforcement of the ego which furnishes the patients the dynamism necessary to “cross the bar” and take the impetus enabling them to overcome the deepest fixations of their neurosis.

Testimony: account of a session

The transferential reviviscence of the experiences and fantasies of “birth” often occurs in a very vivid manner. The following account, which I reproduce in its freshness, bears moving witness to it:

Session of 13 July 1973 — Hardly lying on the couch, I begin to cry. I feel my birth approaching. I am afraid; if I take one more step, it is the void, anguish. I find myself alone. I am afraid of dying. No, I do not want it! Death anguishes me too much. I want to close my eyes, to curl up as a foetus, and to sleep in this room where I perceive peace. The doctor is behind me; his silence weighs upon me.

They want to put me into the world — then it is up to me to manage, and too bad if I fall on my face! Why am I not a baby that the doctor could take in his arms and to whom he could show how beautiful the world is! I want him to reassure me, to put me in confidence.

The doctor is called away and absents himself. When he returns, he says to me: “So, where are we in this birth?” This question provokes in me a new shock. So, it is true that I am being born. I weep. I want so much to sit up, to look at the doctor to persuade myself that I am not alone, but I dare not — I have the impression that it is forbidden, that I shall be judged. The doctor verbalises my desire: I sit up; the contact is established almost instantaneously; I feel at last in safety.

But I still dare not look at the doctor. Like my mother, he brings me and gives me everything; I have nothing to bring him. I am there only accessorily; other patients need him! Then, through the analysis he makes of the situation, through his words, his voice, his serenity, I feel at last in confidence; I feel I have the right to look at him; I have the impression of beginning a little to live, to love. I begin to breathe better: I glimpse the deep peace, but I feel that it is still very fragile.

The maternal voice! I terribly want it and at the same time I refuse it. I would so much like to hear the voice of the mother who has just put me into the world in joy and who calls me to life — and not that of the mother who put me into the world with death in her soul!

The acceptance of birth may be accompanied by an instantaneous relief of anxiety and by the disappearance, also sudden, of certain symptoms. Accepting to be born, the patient passes at once from the regime of hatred to that of love. He accepts his body, his identity, his responsibility and his communication with the world — which entails the disappearance of envy and jealousy; persecution and anxiety give way to reparation in a great feeling of joy.

Healing comprises the reconciliation with the mother — unconscious fantasmatic mother as well as real, who becomes then the one who gives life and rejoices in all growths. The child being accepted in a profound joy can at last find the plane of inner silence, of peace and joy that signs his mental health. To heal perfectly will even be to go further and — going beyond the relation with the mother, source of life and love — will consist in acceding to the spiritual plane of the consciousness of love and life.

Psychotherapy thus reduces to a maieutics. The development of man traces a spiral in which each turn — like that of a winding staircase seen from above — reflects the previous one. Spiritual rebirth is situated at the apogee of physical birth: the serene beauty of the face of the mystic in contemplation reflects that of the newborn welcomed gently by loving hands.

Schizoidy and accompaniment

If the child is traumatised, it cries, cries, cries and rejects its mother. The latter fails to console it and feels herself also frustrated and disappointed, even incapable of accomplishing her task as mother. If she is not very balanced, patient and loving, she may renounce trying to save the situation; she will then reject her child in turn. Thus is constituted a vicious circle that is the foundation of all later schizophrenias.

It is before this situation that we find ourselves twenty, thirty, forty years later. It has solidly established itself at the deepest part of the patient’s being, and it will be necessary, slowly, patiently, to relive it with him to bring him to healing.

The rupture of contact with the mother becomes indispensable for these children, in order to protect them against the deadly anxiety of abandonment. Thus are created the schizoid tendencies, the foundation of an eventual later schizophrenia. A capital point of the healing of these schizoid tendencies is to enable these patients to elaborate the panic anxiety lived as a descent into death and into a terror without limit and without name. One readily understands that an unrestricted presence, true love and perfect tolerance for anxiety are indispensable on the part of the doctor who dares to accompany his patient in such a regression into hell.

The Electronic Ear blows upon the embers

Psychotherapy must accompany, in these cases, the treatment under the Electronic Ear — therapeutic communication being required to drain anxiety as fast as it appears. Failing which, affects and tensions accumulating, the case of the patient may worsen under the influence of the treatment.

The Electronic Ear blows upon the embers. If the chimney of ventilation is found obstructed, the smoke will fill the room.

In psychotics, one must ensure their desire to heal, to evolve, their acceptance of being born, of leaving symbiosis, before undertaking a treatment under the Electronic Ear — failing which, one risks a worsening of the symptomatology.

The therapist must dare to descend

We have all passed through the experience of the “death” that was, for our unconscious, our birth. We know nothing of true death since we cannot, by definition, have lived it. This experience of the anxiety of death that was birth — this progressive descent towards death until the respiratory reflex is triggered — means that we have all, in the depths of ourselves, known at least a microexperience of psychotic anxiety.

If we can, without using any defence mechanism, descend regressively to this anxiety which is within us, we shall then be capable of vibrating in empathy with the psychotic anxieties of our patients afflicted with them.

We cannot guide, help an individual to heal if we ourselves refuse to descend to where he must first descend in order to be able to heal.

If we are afraid of his anxiety, we shall not be able to help him; he will find himself alone at the moment when he has an indispensable need of support, of help, of sympathetic, loving understanding. He must find with us the love and understanding he formerly sought with his mother in a contact full of life with her, both physical and psychic, and which he did not find.

The pleasure that his mother should have felt in understanding her child and in calming him if all had gone normally between her and him from birth — the therapist also will experience, and this will be his reward if he has the courage and competence to confront all the patient’s anxiety and to understand it with love.

To help him, one must be able to descend into hell with the patient in his anguish, accompany him, understand him, thanks to empathy. It is an act of love.

Not to fear suffering a little, sharing his anxiety, daring to descend with him so as to accompany him afterwards in the ascent. May he at no moment feel alone, or misunderstood, or — worse still — judged, condemned, rejected.

The mentally ill person is often treated as a pariah by today’s society, because his anxiety awakens in us a very deep malaise, which we may feel as intolerable. We then resort to the incarceration of the patient to protect ourselves against his anxiety.

To dare to be born is to establish a relation, to dare to project one’s anger onto the mother while accepting to exist independently of her — that is to say, without projecting oneself into the mother.

One constructs only in the acceptance of a birth fantasy.

— Dr Jean Sarkissoff, Centre du Langage, Geneva. Communication to the 4^th International Congress of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, Madrid, May 1974.