L'expérience du rythme chez le bébé et dans le soin psychique

The rhythmicity of experiences organizes a security base in babies. It ensures the development of thinking by the illusion of continuity it provides. The rhythmicity is already an essential characteristic of fetal experiences. The observation of the babies, as well as the clinical study of very early processes show how the lost security is sought for in the rhythmic structures of subjective experience. The rhythmicity is also an essential characteristic of intersubjectivity. The creative potential of intersubjective experiences of attunement, adjustment, communication, understanding, partly lies on their rhythmic nature. This is also how it goes in maternal cares, interactions and playful interchanges. The same considerations can be applied to the caring relationship, the therapeutic process and to the modalities of encounter it supposes. The rhythmicity in the therapeutic process can also be observed in other places: alternation between experiences of understanding and experiences of separation (or back-and-forth approach of the depressive position); rhythmicity in the passage through different emotional states, which is generated by the process of understanding and interpretation itself.