"The noise monitor": a developmental perspective on verbal and nonverbal meaning-making in psychoanalysis.

This paper discusses a contribution of developmental theory to the psychoanalytic concept of "the talking cure." The developmental theory presented is the dyadic expansion of consciousness model (Tronick 2007), a model consistent with the principles of nonlinear systems theory. The concept of "polysemic bundles" as a way of understanding the multiple simultaneous meaning-making processes occurring in dyadic communication is introduced. The theoretical discussion--focused primarily on the analysis of children--is illustrated with descriptions of videotaped sequences from the first session in the analysis of a five-year-old boy. The relevance of these insights to the analytic treatment of adults is then considered.