Listening for Wellness

The original English edition of Pierre Sollier’s book appeared in the United States in 2005 under the title Listening for Wellness, crowned that same year with the Best Psychology Book Award conferred by the American Association of Independent Publishers. The French translation (Apprends à écouter pour ton bien-être) appeared in 2017, with a preface by Léna Tomatis, a foreword by Christophe Besson, and a translation carried by Sandra Huguenin, Marie Blons and Francis Besson. A reference treatise on the pedagogy of listening, structured in six books that lead the reader from the anatomy of the ear to spirituality, by way of learning, the listening test and the psychologist ear.

“To listen is to communicate, to establish a contact with our environment as well as with the inner universe of our thoughts and our feelings.”

— Pierre Sollier

Presentation

The work was born of a personal story. A Frenchman established in California at the beginning of the 1980s, Pierre Sollier was unable to make himself understood in English: his accent was such that he preferred to keep silent. In 1984, a scientist friend suggested he consult a certain Dr Tomatis, in Paris, who would “tune his ears to the frequencies of American”. What was to be a simple linguistic re-education became a decisive encounter: Sollier, transformed by the programme, reoriented his entire career towards the clinical practice of the method and ended up founding, in California, the Mozart Center, which he would direct for three decades.

It is this twofold position — that of the patient who experienced the method in his own body, and that of the practitioner who brought it to life for thousands of children and adults — that gives the book its singular colour. Sollier combines theoretical exposition, clinical observations drawn from his own practice and savoury anecdotes. He writes for parents as much as for scientists, in a simple and direct language, without ever falling into simplism.

The book was largely advanced during Alfred Tomatis’s lifetime, who explicitly encouraged its publication during his last meeting with Sollier. Tomatis died on Christmas Day 2001; the English edition appeared in 2005, and the preface then written by Léna Tomatis, his wife, hailed “a masterly presentation of the theoretical aspects of the neurophysiology of the ear, and of the numerous applications that can be drawn from it”.

Genesis of the French edition

The French edition prolongs an editorial journey that began in Mexico. It was there that a foundation of national scope introduced the method into disadvantaged schools, under the supervision of Pierre Sollier, and that Besson of Switzerland — manufacturer of the Besson® Electronic Ear and direct heir of Dr Tomatis’s work — patronised first the Spanish translation (Introducción a la pedagogía de la escucha, Sial Pigmalión, 2016), and then this French edition (Sial Pigmalión, 2017). For the occasion, Sollier rewrote the first two chapters of “The Spiritual Ear”, with the concern of better delineating that demanding subject.

Christophe Besson signs the foreword, in which he recalls that his own meeting with Pierre Sollier took place “on the recommendation of Alfred Tomatis, to whom I also owe my professional orientation since I devote it to the constant development of the Besson® Electronic Ear and its complements”.

Contents

The work is articulated in six major parts, supplemented by two appendices and a bibliography.

• I. Listening for wellness — the founding narrative: why listen, why wellness, why now.

• II. What we ought to know about our ears — anatomy and physiology of the ear (outer, middle, inner, vestibule, cochlea), air and bone conduction, skin and audition, the “human antenna”, sounds that charge and sounds that fatigue, the vagus nerve and the feeling of wellness, the three integrators (cochlear, vestibular, visual), links between the ear and the voice, laterality, dominant ear and mouth, body image.

• III. The ear of learning — autism (with detailed case studies), dyslexia, attention disorders (Tom and Jeff), the gift for languages and the notion of “ethnic ear”.

• IV. The listening test — the ideal listening curve, the meaning of air and bone curves, the three zones (body, language, creativity), selectivity, spatialisation, lateralisation, the four listening profiles (dreamer, controller, depressed, indecisive), dialogue between the ears and the symbolism of the ears.

• V. The psychologist ear — in utero listening, the maternal voice, sonic birth, the role of the father, the signs of refusal to grow up in the child and in the adult.

• VI. The spiritual ear — Alfred Tomatis and the spiritual question, the listening posture, sacred music and chants, “our heart breathes through the ear”, the divine Mozart.

• Appendices — The listening posture; The bone voice.

Place in the work

Where most of the works written by Tomatis himself are above all books of an inventor — in which concepts are elaborated in real time, sometimes in struggle with the institution — Sollier’s is a book of transmission: Tomatis’s thought is here recapitulated, ordered, illustrated, without losing any of its clinical charge. It is the work one can recommend to a parent who is discovering the method, to a teacher who is intrigued, to a professional searching for a way in, to a therapist anxious to recover the purity of the principles behind the market drifts.

Sollier devotes several pages of his introduction to warning against the “digital ersatzes” and the “therapists or fitters” trained in a weekend, who apply the method mechanically, without a prior listening test, without a maternal voice, without follow-up. He recalls, by contrast, what constitutes the authenticity of a device such as the Besson® Electronic Ear: the analogue processing of sound ("essential for the human ear, which analyses sound physiologically in an analogue manner"), fidelity to forty years of Dr Tomatis’s research, and the necessity of a properly framed clinical setting.

In brief

A pivotal book in the bibliography of the method. To be read by every parent confronted with the school difficulties, autism, attention or language disorders of their children; by every adult intrigued by the link between listening, voice and inner state; by every practitioner anxious to ground their practice on solid foundations. The tone is warm, the clinical examples numerous, the pedagogy faultless. Tomatis himself had foreseen its importance before he died: posterity has proved him right.

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Pierre Sollier — Sial Pigmalión, Madrid, 2017. “Santé et Bien-être” series. Edition patronised by Besson of Switzerland with the support of the F.I.A.P.E. (International Federation of Audio-Psycho-Phonology and Pedagogy of Listening).

Original English edition: Listening for Wellness — An Introduction to the Tomatis Method, Mozart Center Press, 2005 (ISBN 0-9763639-0-9). Spanish edition: Introducción a la pedagogía de la escucha, Sial Pigmalión, 2016 (ISBN 978-2-8399-1661-5).