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This paper uses a case vignette to show how musical elements of speech are a crucial source of information regarding the patient's emotional states and associated memory systems that are activated at a given moment in the analytic field. There are specific psychoacoustic markers associated with different memory systems which indicate whether a patient is immersed in a state of creative intersubjective relatedness related to autobiographical memory, or has been triggered into a traumatic memory system. When a patient feels immersed in an atmosphere of intersubjective mutuality, dialogue features a rhythmical and tuneful form of speech featuring improvized reciprocal imitation, theme and variation. When the patient is catapulted into a traumatic memory system, speech becomes monotone and disjointed. Awareness of such acoustic features of the traumatic memory system helps to alert the analyst that such a shift has taken place informing appropriate responses and interventions. Communicative musicality (Malloch & Trevarthen 2009) originates in the earliest non-verbal vocal communication between infant and care-giver, states of primary intersubjectivity. Such musicality continues to be the primary vehicle for transmitting emotional meaning and for integrating right and left hemispheres. This enables communication that expresses emotional significance, personal value as well as conceptual reasoning.

This paper explores how untold and unresolved intergenerational trauma may be transmitted through unconscious channels of communication, manifesting in the dreams of descendants. Unwitting carriers for that which was too horrific for their ancestors to bear, descendants may enter analysis through an unconscious need to uncover past secrets, piece together ancestral histories before the keys to comprehending their terrible inheritance die with their forebears. They seek the relational containment of the analytic relationship to provide psychological conditions to bear the unbearable, know the unknowable, speak the unspeakable and redeem the unredeemable. In the case of 'Rachael', initial dreams gave rise to what Hobson (1984) called 'moving metaphors of self' in the analytic field. Dream imagery, projective and introjective processes in the transference-countertransference dynamics gradually revealed an unknown ancestral history. I clarify the back and forth process from dream to waking dream thoughts to moving metaphors and differentiate the moving metaphor from a living symbol. I argue that the containment of the analytic relationship nested within the security of the analytic space is a necessary precondition for such healing processes to occur.

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This paper applies the clinical thinking of Wilfred Bion to the field of psychoanalytic couple therapy. A relationship may form a container for the container–contained dynamics of the couple, involving temporal and spatial aspects as well as an intersubjective relational third, an unconscious co-creation of the couple. Partners may bring to the new relationship their respective ‘malignant dowries’, consisting of unconscious unresolved traumatic material. The dowry box releases its nefarious contents to create an entangled interpersonal drama that I call the ‘interlocking traumatic scene’. The defensive systems that the two individuals bring dovetail together, and the interlocking mechanism may deadlock in such a way as to exert a ‘malignant third’ presence, militating against psychological growth and learning from experience. ‘The conjoint selected fact’ refers to how the selected facts pertaining to each partner cohere to create a third thing (after Bion, 1963; after Poincaré, 1952). It is related to a non-pathological use of Bion’s concept of reversible perspective. The process of intuiting a conjoint selected fact may also involve uncovering networks of links between four layers of history lying behind the present issue: the current relational situation, the couple’s marital history, internalisations of family-of-origin relational experiences, and intergenerational traumatic matters cross-transmitted in the current relationship.