"The origin of language, the need to communicate"

Fourth interview of the series Alain Gerber × Alfred Tomatis in SON Magazine. In no. 33, December 1972, Tomatis deepens the role of the maternal voice and the psychological origin of language. Starting from a striking demonstration with a fourteen-year-old schizophrenic “who has not been born” (complete account of the sonic-birth session), he expounds the nostalgia for the womb as the motor of the desire to communicate, the ambient air as the “instrument of language” and a prolonged “umbilical cord”, and demonstrates that the first words “mama” and “papa” appear at first mechanically through the play of lips and soft palate — well before designating the parents. The text concludes on babbling, which precedes stammering, and the role of the desire to communicate with the father (social stage of language), with announcements of the clinical applications (dyslexia, stammering) which will be the subject of the next issue.

“SON” Magazine — no. 33 — December 1972
The maternal voice
Alfred A. TOMATIS: “THE ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE, THE NEED TO COMMUNICATE”
Interview gathered by Alain Gerber

Presentation

The first two words of our vocabulary are indeed “mama” and “papa”, but they do not primitively designate the mother and the father. They appear in a very mechanical way and represent the first verbal chain. In this further instalment, Professor Tomatis continues his study devoted to the learning of sounds by the child.

Sonic birth: a chance discovery

We saw in our previous issue that Professor Tomatis one day made, by chance, a discovery that was to prove extremely fertile. He realised that by making a subject pass from the conditions of hearing in an aquatic milieu (that of the foetus bathing in the amniotic fluid) to those of hearing in an aerial milieu (our natural one), one effected a veritable “birth through sound”. The subject, for example, could relive his coming into the world, regress to earlier stages of development. Profound psychological reactions were recorded.

This first experience opened the door to extremely novel research. One could reasonably wonder whether, by domesticating this still wild technique, one could not succeed in controlling the reactions obtained, which would allow them to be used to curative ends.

Alfred Tomatis, let it not be forgotten, is a man for whom healing is the first of preoccupations. A passionate researcher, a clearer of virgin lands, he never forgets that he is a doctor. When he made the observations recalled above, he immediately glimpsed the possibilities that opened from this point in the domain of psychology, of psychiatry and of psychoanalysis. Not being a specialist in these questions, he carefully refrained from playing the sorcerer’s apprentice and contented himself with setting out what he had seen to those skilled in the matter.

The schizophrenic child “who has not been born”

These observations, of course, could only arouse the interest of psychoanalysts, especially curious about mother-child relations, the genesis of affectivity, psychological life before birth, etc. Intrigued, charmed, a representative of this corporation (generally suspicious of ideas not born within it) finally paid him a visit, accompanied by one of her patients.

“It was,” the Professor recounts, “an astonishing child: a chubby fourteen-year-old who seemed to repel his mother as though they were two electromagnets of the same polarity! He had a mannerism: he looked as if he were constantly sucking something… I had never seen a case of this kind; the psychoanalyst told me he was a schizophrenic. I asked her for more explanations and she had this formula: ‘He is a child who has not been born.’ I now understood why she came to see me.”

“A fortnight later, having recorded the mother’s voice and put my system together, I brought everyone into my laboratory. I took my place near the door. The mother settled on my left with the psychoanalyst. The child himself was somewhat anxious, for the room was very small, and he was scribbling everywhere with some chalk he had found. Suddenly, I put out the sound. I did not yet wish to carry out sonic birth, but simply to make him hear filtered sounds similar to the acoustic impressions the foetus may have in the uterine milieu.”

“The child suddenly stopped scribbling. He rushed towards me at full speed to switch off the light. We could now only see a shadow walking by the faint glow of the standby lights of the apparatus. He rushed towards his mother, settled on her knees, drew this woman’s arms around himself, and began to suck his thumb! It can be said that he had put himself back in his mother’s womb. This was all the more striking in that for some ten years he had been living beside her as if he no longer knew her. When the tape ended, he stood up, switched the light back on, and the session ended there.”

“A week later, we made an appointment, this time to carry out sonic birth itself. On her return, the mother told me that relations between herself and her son had considerably improved. The child had approached her; a certain number of things had happened to which she was not accustomed. We begin the second session. Same scenario: the child switches off the light and goes to place himself against the mother in an intra-uterine posture. From the first seconds of sonic birth, he begins to babble: this surely had a meaning, but, alas, we were not in a position to grasp it. At the end, he switches the light back on, returns to his mother and buttons up all her buttons. This behaviour was symbolic. It was as if he had shut behind him a room he had decided to leave for ever. Besides, the psychoanalyst was not mistaken: ‘See,’ she told me, ‘he has just been born! I would never have thought it could go so fast…’”

In fact, it had even gone a little too fast. Tomatis willingly recognises this, having not the foolish pride of defending his errors. Practised so abruptly, sonic birth exposes the subject to grave dangers: the schizophrenic in question even attempted to end his life. But this “failure” was big with teaching. The psychoanalyst judged it preferable to leave it at that.

The Professor, for his part, thought only of finding a method that would procure all the benefits of his first experiments without entailing any of the drawbacks. “In order to understand better what was happening, I went more and more slowly. Today I use my system with the collaboration of other psychoanalysts, but I take a great many precautions. By controlling perfectly the various stages of the process, I have succeeded in rendering it harmless and apt to relieve patients without alarming side effects.”

We are all nostalgic for the womb

Such were the practical consequences of attempts which, at the outset, had been conducted only out of curiosity, “to see what would happen”. There were also theoretical consequences, and very important ones.

It was by analysing the reactions he provoked by imposing hearing in a liquid milieu, then by carrying out sonic birth, that Alfred Tomatis understood what exactly this need to communicate was, in which he sees the origin of language. According to him, it is for the individual a matter of preserving, or of recovering, if he has lost it, the relation he maintained with the maternal milieu before birth.

We are all nostalgic for the womb. Our entry into the world is made on a cry of distress that, according to Tomatis, perhaps bears witness “to our dismay at the call of that lost paradise that is the mother’s womb”. No doubt, the embryo’s contact with the latter is more physical than psychological, but language too — which seeks symbolically to re-edit this contact — has a physical dimension. Speech, which provokes vibrations of the surrounding air, is a kind of limb by which we seek to “touch” our interlocutor. For our researcher, indeed, “the instrument we use to speak is not, truly, as is so willingly believed, our tongue, our mouth, our larynx, but the air that surrounds us”.

To speak is to prevent the discontinuity between us and the outside world, between us and the others. It is to maintain a link with what is not us: to maintain, to a certain extent, an umbilical cord. For the first dialogue, Alfred Tomatis stresses, is a “dialogue of flesh”. At the basis of the desire to communicate one finds a desire to be in carnal contact with the other — that first other: the mother. Everything happens as if the foetus had been aware of a soldering of his being with the environment, then limited to the uterine walls, but which, after birth, will not cease to widen. “To be born,” says Tomatis, “is to become aware that the womb has burst into colossal dimensions to become the universe. One never leaves one’s mother: one gives the maternal milieu other dimensions. The uterine walls will grow to the cradle, then to the room, then to the family, to the homeland, to the cosmos, etc.!”

When the prenatal relation has been disappointing

However, certain beings who live among us are like the schizophrenic of whom we spoke above: they “have not been born”. What does this strange expression mean? Precisely that these individuals are inhabited by no desire to communicate with the environment. It is as though they did not feel that nostalgia for the womb of which we were speaking and which seems to characterise all “true” born ones. For them not to feel it, the prenatal relation with this womb must have been highly disappointing: this is again what Tomatis has observed.

Let us imagine a mother who does not deeply desire her child. It would be a mistake to think that the latter is not, in one way or another, sensitive to this refusal, and that already before birth. On the contrary, he will register this more or less open hostility. At the limbo of his consciousness, one will find the mark not of a soldering, but of a cut with the outside world.

Such a child will not have, once born, a lost paradise to reconquer. Communication with others will therefore be poor, or even non-existent. For, of course, any anomaly in the structure of relations between the child and his mother, then between the child and the outside, will have a repercussion on language. The absence of the desire to speak is found singularly in schizophrenics. There is a “ideal sonic path” that a little being must follow to reach maturity. Unfortunately, the ideal, in this domain as in many others, has no concrete existence. There is always some accident to make the fine trajectory deviate.

From babbling to stammering: “beggen”

This accident may be benign and correct itself, as it were. But it also happens that it presents a character of gravity sufficient for the elaboration of language to be deeply perturbed. For language too evolves according to a well-defined path (which the subject re-runs entirely when submitted to sonic birth).

Thus the first words are specially pronounced to the mother, in a dialogue that continues the one that had been begun, flesh to flesh, before birth. At first deprived of speech, the child quickly becomes that “babbler” that the word “babbling” seeks to designate through its Dutch etymology “beggen”. And Alfred Tomatis continues: “From the few ‘a-reu… a-reu…’ which he knows how to modulate for the mother and for her alone and which are already rich in meaning to her, the child engages, intrepid, in the elaboration of complex words such as mama… papa… pipi… popo… dodo… This glossary is surely at the outset only a simple play of sounds in which the adult applies himself to seek straightaway a meaning.”

The latter will come later, and the father will have to wait a long time before he sees himself really designated by the word “papa” of which he is so proud. “The desire to communicate with the father, indeed, is at the starting point of a new stage in the structuring of language: the social stage!” This insofar as the father, as contemporary psychoanalysis affirms, is, for the child who encounters him well after the mother, already a stranger, “a constellation near and distant at once, crushing and burning”. Thus Tomatis has scientifically verified the common intuition: the first two words of our vocabulary are indeed “mama” and “papa”.

“Mama” and “papa”: a mechanical genesis

But he immediately defuses all the myths that had been built upon this: these two terms do not primitively designate the mother and the father. They appear, on the contrary, in a very mechanical way. The original cry “goes with our breath, superimposes itself on it and identifies with it. It is born as soon as the mouth wants to open and modulates on the physiological automatisms. Indeed, during the oral opening, the tongue and the soft palate move apart simultaneously to come closer to each other again when the mouth closes. The sound thus created finds itself interrupted, but not broken, while the first ‘ma-ma-ma-ma…’ takes flight into space.”

Many parents will be disappointed by this explanation, but Alfred Tomatis tells them they are wrong: “This very mechanical way of glimpsing the genesis of language will likely break the spell in the hearts of many parents, hanging on the first words they wish to surround with meaning, with identification. Yet it takes away nothing, we believe, from the beauty of the transcendent structuring of human language.”

“To say only ‘ma — ma — ma — ma’, to realise that very quickly this first verbal chain knows on its own, as soon as it manifests itself, how to bring forth so much joy and so many smiles on this face that evolves in the sphere of the aim — to understand that this first acoustic modulation serves as a call, a bell — but this is already, for man, an apprenticeship of the human, having grasped all that the spoken function entails — that is to say, the use one will be able to make of it. It is the becoming aware of the vocal gesture and of its informative value. There, once more, man accedes to the human. From breath he knows how to make language be born…”

At the starting point, then, the very breath of life. The breath, plus a sucking gesture of the lips that is “the most animal in the line of our automatic movements”. From there, everything is going to be built. “There is,” writes Alfred Tomatis, “only the first word that counts. The rest is but a game — a game of acoustic construction. Let the lips tighten and cease the gesture of sucking, and ‘pa-pa-pa-pa’ succeeds ‘ma-ma-ma-ma…’”

Two words already, and the verbal world is built. The word, more precisely the spoken chain “ma-ma-ma-ma” and “pa-pa-pa-pa…” has taken on a meaning, and this meaning is practically universal. The mother will be designated, in many places on the globe, in the same way. This “ma-ma”, so associated with the gesture of sucking, will soon designate that being one suckles; “pa-pa” will naturally address the other. Henceforth, the apprenticeship will be difficult for weeks. One will have to speak, and to speak alone. One will have to practise endlessly. Thus, as soon as a deep call awakens in us, we shall know how to babble greatly and roundly, without weariness, provided that nothing comes at any moment to trouble this preoccupation.

The perils of development

Indeed, “the slightest obstruction that risks impeding this essential phase often compromises catastrophically the elaboration of the most human of our gestures. An illness that vexes us and worries us forces us to lose the taste for playing with our verbal rattle. A sorrow, a worry appears, and we are already vulnerable. They will quickly block our blossoming. Provided that the calls, the verbal signs, those we already know how to direct, very clumsily it is true, but of which we nonetheless have the use, remain without response, if the mother is absent, each vocal gesture loses its meaning, and the game of construction will soon be without appeal. It may evoke a painful memory, that of a presence no longer seen, that of the call of a voice no longer heard. What precautions must surround the newborn at this stage so that he does not risk, in the growing whirlwind of modern life, compromising the acquisitions indispensable to him in the progression of his language.”

From the dyslexic to chronic stammering

But it is at each stage of development that perils threaten. The dyslexic, for example — who, whatever his intelligence, experiences at school great difficulties in reading — is typically a subject who has not been able to benefit from the ideal sonic path of which we evoked the broad outlines in our previous issue.

For Tomatis, this disorder arises not so much when communication with the mother has proved deficient, but when the encounter with the father (and thus with social language) has been difficult. The specialist may also be in a position to receive in consultation children whose language has become fixed at one point in its evolution: it “remains poorly elaborated and does not result in a normal linguistic structure”. This is what happens with certain stammerers who have not had, at the unconscious level in particular, normal relations with their father. In this case, the Professor explains, language “remains fixed at the stage of that created for the mother, and from babbling, the first song elaborated for her, is born stammering, a chronic form of this earlier stage of communication”.

Fortunately, the method elaborated by Alfred Tomatis allows the often very important damage caused by such accidents of trajectory to be repaired. Practical experience had triggered theoretical extrapolations, but these, in their turn, were to engender practical applications. Thus was developed, with the help of the Electronic Ear, an original treatment to which impressive results are owed. Next month, we shall have the opportunity to penetrate its secret.

Place of this interview in the series

This interview is the fourth of a series of fifteen published monthly by Alain Gerber in the journal SON Magazine from September 1972 to December 1977. For the complete contents and access to the other interviews, see the mother-article of the series.

Source: Alain Gerber, “The maternal voice — Alfred A. Tomatis: The origin of language, the need to communicate”, SON Magazine no. 33, Paris, December 1972. Digitisation: Christophe Besson, June 2010.