by Rebecca Shapiro, Psy.D.

What conditions do we need to proceed?

A patient walks past me into the office and sits or lies down on the couch. Looking occurs along the way, sometimes no more pointedly than at the door. One patient beams, giggling almost instantaneously across the threshold; another barely looks my way. Nod, hi, hello. We don’t discuss these interactions, not usually, not unless we’re so deep in that the most foundational, procedural of behaviors surrender themselves to punctuation. Joseph Sandler (1976) considers commonsense ways of proceeding in terms of “free-floating behavioral responsiveness,” a phrase to normalize empathic engagement and the enacted dimension of any analysis: As with all relationships, patient and analyst are entrained, one to the other, the rhythmic push and pull of interpersonal process the substrate upon which sense-making depends. 

But what “sense” is this? If therapy’s sine qua non is by and large enactment, do we speak, in session, in the realm of sense, or sensuality? Does the difference matter? Even in language, is therapeutic exchange not the oscillatory hum of two notes syncing, one with the other, in and out of phase? The musicologist Gary Tomlinson (2015) writes: “In musical usage, entrainment names our capacity for ‘beat-based processing’ or ‘beat induction’: our ability to perceive the regularity of an even or isochronous series of pulses, to predict the continuation of the series, and to coordinate our activities in advance to this continued regularity” (p. 77). He argues, further, that early hominin sociality—Homo erectus and heidelbergensis a million years ago and more—was built, in part, through entrainment, specifically, the beat-induced production of handaxes, a process known as knapping. That’s our forebears communicating the importance of tool production (weapons, no less) not in language but via the compellingly and mimetically reproducible sound of their manufacture. Entrainment, in this sense, is embodied cognition and “sense,” therefore, axiomatically sensual, whether meaningful or not.  

How common-sense, then, is behavioral responsiveness? How present is meaning in the “enactment” embodied at the door? The giggle, the non-response, are these not contact-based modes of knowing? Forms of touching, commonsensuality? 

But if in such proximity, “two gazes look into each other’s eyes…” and we “say that they are touching…coming into contact—the one with the other…,” what might it mean that contact necessarily “intervenes between x and x…,” you and me, so that gazing becomes “the continual interruption of an interruption,” the disconfirmation of separateness, “the negating upheaval of the interval, the death of between?” (Derrida, 2005, p. 2). A giggle, a sighed hello, the door clicks shut, look—the explosive disarticulation of mine versus yours. We are entrained, each to the other, hypnotized, even, by the force of a look. “If two gazes come into contact, the one with the other, the question will always be whether they are stroking or striking each other—and where the difference would lie” (Derrida, 2005, p. 2). Contact, we might say, makes movement possible, not by making sense (stop!), but by driving process on.