Matching, attunement and the psychoanalytic dialogue

This paper is concerned with unformulated events in analytic sequences before the crystallization that makes verbal interpretation possible. It examines the use of certain concepts from infant research, particularly amodal perception and attunement, which may be of use to the clinical analyst. It is noted that time-sequence concepts, such as musical ones, like affect-attunement, are poorly developed in psychoanalysis. Illustrations of attunements in analysis are attempted by means of doggerel verses about some patients. It is suggested that a progressive movement or dialectic between the pre-verbal affect-attunement level and formalized interpretation may be optimal in analytic therapy.