The Tomatis Myth

A critical article signed by M. Gomez and S. Tomkiewicz, published in the journal « Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence » (pages 681 to 689, around 1980). The authors — both from child psychiatry, S. Tomkiewicz being a leading figure in the field — offer a frankly sceptical reading of audio-psycho-phonology: they describe Alfred Tomatis’s method as a para-religious and messianic system of thought rather than as scientific knowledge, and analyse the mechanisms of the « myth » that secures its success. A piece added to the file for the sake of documentary balance.

M. Gomez and S. Tomkiewicz

Summary

Starting from a simple method for re-educating the voice, audio-psycho-phonology, Tomatis (an ENT specialist) developed a therapeutic instrument that claims to take charge of a growing number of pathological pictures, from physical ailments to mental illnesses. We show how the scientific and ideological presuppositions underlying his conception of psychopathology, based on intuition and magical thought, cannot constitute a coherent theoretical model. We postulate that Tomatis’s success comes from the fact that he presents himself as the providential man capable of achieving miraculous cures.

Summary

The Tomatis’ myth. — From a simple method of reeducation of the voice, the audio-psycho-phonology, Tomatis (ENT) developed a therapeutic instrument claiming to tackle an increasing number of pathological pictures from physical ailments to mental illnesses. We show how the scientific and ideological presuppositions which underlie his conception of psychopathology, based on intuition and magical thought, cannot constitute a coherent theoretical model. We assume that Tomatis’s success results from the fact that he presents himself as the providential man, capable of achieving miraculous cures.

Keywords: Voice - Re-education.

« In the beginning there was the ear ». Thus might one title the journey of A. Tomatis, at the end of which the organ of hearing attains a dimension of the absolute and becomes an ultimate point of reference, a kind of modern incarnation of the soul. This author describes the ear as the seat of consciousness, going so far as to evoke the « perceptual desires of the cochlea » [15, p. 59]. For him, listening grounds the human race by making access to verticality possible, the skin itself being merely « a differentiated piece of ear » [13, p. 163] that ensures the continuity between the ear and the rest of the body. Having reached the conviction that the destiny of man is bound up with his auditory evolution, he developed a method, audio-psycho-phonology, which claims to take charge of a growing number of pathological pictures, from physical ailments to mental illnesses. After a brief historical reminder and an account of the principles of the method, we shall attempt to understand what makes Tomatis successful through an analysis of his discourse.

An otorhinolaryngologist specialising in occupational deafness, Tomatis began his research in 1945 among arsenal workers. He noticed that a disturbance of hearing is commonly accompanied by vocal disorders. He found the same correlation in certain singers, concluded that they damage their ears by singing, and proposed an explanation that would become the « Tomatis effect », registered in 1947 at the Académie de Médecine by Maublanc and Husson [13, p. 107]: « The voice contains only what the ear hears » [13, p. 52]. This « Effect » would also be « registered » at the Académie des Sciences by Monnier and Husson (ibid.).

Having observed that by masking the right ear of singers he provokes a heaviness of timbre, a breakdown of the rhythm of the singing and the beginning of stammering, he deduces that the right ear is the directing one; he thus demonstrates that stammering is the consequence of a left-lateralised listening, and in 1954 he creates the « toggle » or « electronic ear », set to condition the subject to listen on the right. Thanks to this invention, « after a month, the subject produces hours of progressive vocality » [3, no. 1], the « lateralised tics progress in the ear, foreign languages can be learned! The method then takes charge of the dyslexic, and one witnesses the emergence of this new formula »: « One reads by way of… the ear » [10].

Studies of intrauterine hearing often show that hearing is a vocal conditioning,

that it is from the stage of Tomatis realises through listening. To audio-psycho-phonology as « a therapeutic instrument that claims to take charge of a growing number of pathological pictures, from physical ailments to mental illnesses », and proposes to carry out re-education on the basis of the latest progress of the maternal voice.

Then the research takes a new direction: the psychopathological conditions (dyslexia, stammering and left-handedness) are attributed to a lag in the mother that carries over onto the child. Left-lateralisation would be so: it is the psychic and the pathological that are crossed. All disorders are in a certain way the expression of a faulty listening [13, p. 224].

Psychological problems are apprehended as the after-effects of a deviation in the ideal auditory evolution that leads from the maternal universe to the encounter with the father. In this view, psychosis is bound up with a process of reconditioning at the end of which the subject is supposed to attain psychic equilibrium, by way of an ideal listening.

A. Tomatis’s representation of the world

In the system that, for Tomatis, governs human destiny, listening and language are seen as two stages of one and the same evolution that leads the being from its primary animality to humanisation, and listening is the privileged perception through which « the cleavage of the human within man » is accomplished by connecting him to the cosmos.

The unconscious

To this listening plugged into the cosmos, vector of a spiritual elevation, is opposed another listening that addresses the desires of man, the animal within him. This cleavage defines two structures: the « I », through which consciousness manifests itself, and the « Me », or « Ego »: product of an unconscious that man obeys as the master of his destiny, refusing to acknowledge his dependence upon the higher order he has engendered: « Likewise we might remember that there are two ways of hearing ». One appeals to consciousness and evokes that ear which knows how to perceive in the silence and the serene calm of thought caught in its slumber at the confines of an intangible communication with matter reduced to its extreme limit. The same ear reaches the language of materiality, the ultimate bond with the agglomeration of energies it represents. The other remains plugged directly into the unconscious and the vegetative life of the Ego » [14, p. 49].

The unconscious is a parasitic function, a

myth that interposes itself between man and the cosmic truth toward which consciousness tends.

The birth of pathology

In this view, pathology results from a rupture of the unconscious upon consciousness. The human body is indeed a functional harmony. When there is a morbid deviation within this harmony, everything happens as if there existed underlying discordances that let pathological wastings develop. Man builds himself from a source that becomes for him a point of anchorage: « Born on the edge-edge of the mother, confined in the lived universe of the pathological » [11, p. 83 and 84]. Pathology is akin to a universe of turpitudes, to a regression to the condemnable pleasures of the senses, while the unconscious is assimilated to sin. These deviations from the ideal process can be introduced as early as the foetal stage, in a perversion of the mother/child relationship which is nothing but the manifestation of a first vitiated mother/child relationship: « The mother, tree of life, comes to become, through the play of the creativity she ascribes to herself, the tree of knowledge, and the fruit she bears her fruit. There it is, then, the initial delight » [11, p. 112].

Tomatis’s construction rests on a fantasy of an all-powerful and fundamentally maleficent mother-progenitor, from whom the child can be delivered only by the salvific entrance of the father: « She who should silently and peacefully accomplish her act of maternity, being a mother maleficent by essence, comes to become through this pregnancy her individuality which lives with its foetus an isolated episode, within a group that excludes them. There it is, then, the first bed in which mother and child coexist incestuously » [11, p. 113]. « It is at that moment that the solar father finds himself ousted » (ibid. p. 114).

Adult sexuality will always keep its imprint on the foetus, and coupling will seal a reunion between these two partners. « Nor is it forbidden to think that the child — even more than the foetus — finds himself, from conception onward, animated by the frantic search to become again his mother’s child, in the coupling with his wife, while she unconsciously desires the desire to be the mother of this partner suddenly and momentarily become the foetus falling asleep in the arms of the omnipotent Mater who gives life » [ibid. p. 148].

Through these excerpts, man appears split in two by the forces that confront one another within him. One is the « transcendent thrust », which seizes him from his conception onward and is immanent to his Becoming; it is the opening onto the cosmic dimension by way of consciousness.

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The other is a pernicious will that insinuates itself into him in the form of the unconscious, a pathological manifestation of the senses insofar as it wants to hear only the enjoyment bound up with the effect of the inscription of reprehensible pleasures. We are far from Freudian theory. And yet Tomatis calls upon psychoanalytic theories to the rescue of his Manichaean system, which attempts to reconcile them with those of transcendence. They provide him with the occasion to construct poetic frescoes, which account for psychic functioning as little rigorously as the omnipresent, all-powerful and quasi-magical legitimation « Why not? »

Effectively from there on, anything is possible, and a few disparate notions, borrowed here and there, will allow the author to fashion at little cost the scenario of the human condition: taking the psychoanalytic models literally and conscientiously throughout his account, he applies himself to finding again in reality the actors of the Oedipal drama: the father, at times now « the mother », moving within « the maternal orb » the Oedipus »; the mother possessive by essence, the consumptive « Sphinx » [11, p. 115]. Tomatis thus plays the psychoanalytic legacy with great reinforcements of ideas, which he fails at and handles like gadgets. This tranquillising digestion of Freudian, Lacanian, etc. theories ends in a caricature of man, a puppet jerked about by the derisory convulsions of an exacerbated sensuality. The patient is the product of the equation: ousted father + possessive mother. By thus reducing psychic mechanisms to algebraic operations, one can secure a semblance of mastery over poorly explained phenomena, and protect oneself from the madness one dreads.

Hearing and psychopathology

For Tomatis, the auditory function presents itself as a balance beam which, by becoming subservient to the one or the other, can tip the subject from health toward pathology. « Listening is bound up with psychology, but it is not psychology. Paradoxically their directions vary in an inverse relation: there are the fewer psychological problems the greater the listening; and in absolute terms, where there is listening, there is no psychology; conversely, the more the listening function escapes, the more the mechanisms of the unconscious establish themselves and grow bold, the inexhaustible source of the science of psychology » [14, p. 167].

Through the successive stages of language, Tomatis has studied the failings of communication which, at different levels, permit the emergence of

Phonic phase

The first language is addressed to the mother, and prolongs the dialogue begun with her during the gestation period. « The first language created for the mother no longer represents for her anything but that babbling sustenance giving rise to a cochlear resonance, while it is ensured by the phonic translation of intra-maternal communication » [11, p. 57].

Syllabic phase

A new phase is introduced by « babbling », and sees the manifestation of an outline of re-orientational symmetry; it is between the recurrent nerves (in which the nervous influx circulates toward the larynx) a structural difference in favour of the left nerve. According to the author, this difference is reflected in the conduction speeds of the influx, which reaches the first motor of the right larynx: the right ear, thanks to the shorter self-listening circuit to the larynx, is all the better informed. This is why one must get used to speaking and listening on the right (on the theoretical critique of this argument, see [4], p. 90). « Laterality is also cortical, since the two hemispheres are anatomically asymmetrical on the visceral plane, and it is this that will impress a cortical dissymmetry upon the appearance of language » [11, p. 91].

From this interpretation, Tomatis believes he finds again the manifestations of the omnipotence of lateralisation through the inflexions of human language: according to whether the first or the second syllable of a word is stressed, dominance will establish itself on the right or the left. « The « mama » and « papa » that we pronounce in a syllabically identical way are quite differently telling from the sexual point of view. Indeed, his « mama » will be « ma-ma » or « ma-ma », and his « papa » will be « pa-pa » or « pa-pa » according to whether it describes a right or left expressive accentuation of the dominant voice » [11, p. 91]. By what imperatives does the child decide to use one path rather than the other in order to lateralise himself? It is here that Tomatis brings in the paternal dynamic, and lays the foundations of his psychopathological theories.

Linguistic phase

The language of the syllabic phase will have to transform itself in order to reach the other, to endow it with the power of socialised language. The child communicates first with his mother, and this from before birth.

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listening. When the mother introduces into the embryo the notion that should render it, she will determine a crisis that will make itself felt by the child himself: that is what happens when the mother introduces into the embryo the notion that should render it [13, p. 224 and 225].

We see through these excerpts how Tomatis extorts a permanent combination between the two phenomena he describes. In a first stage, he reduces psychological problems to problems of « communication », a term he makes into a kind of catch-all for the human condition: at the basis of the desire to communicate, one finds a desire to be « in contact with the other » — the « mother’s contribution » to the mother » [3, no. 33, December 72]. Then he reduces communication to the dimension of a purely physiological phenomenon: hearing. Psyche and hearing become confused, and from then on it suffices to straighten out the hearing… to cure the psyche! In this perspective, the most diverse symptoms or illnesses, original and charged with communication, are no longer anything but the flaw in mother/child or father/child communication. This conception of psychic functioning rests on an accumulation of theoretical references borrowed from different domains, as if the author cared more about convincing than about demonstrating. Here is an example of such reasoning: Negus briefly observes that the eggs of songbirds, hatched by non-singing birds, give songbirds; André Thomas, during the « gaze sign » experiment, shows how a child of less than 10 days reacts instinctively to its mother’s call. Tomatis concludes from this that an « audio-vocal conditioning is already possible at the egg stage » [3, November 72]. Elsewhere, it suffices for him to bring together the child’s chronic stammering with the child’s transitory stammering, in order to declare that « the language of stammerers is the manifestation of an infantile fixation of an affective order » [13, p. 167]. Borrowing also from psychoanalysis, he speaks of the « three generations needed to make a schizophrenic » [13, p. 219], or of « *the poisoning of this « incest » [13, p. 61], that « his « papa » his « papa » according to… » [13, p. 249]. In another domain, he relies on the idea that « in all civilisations patriarchs have been the exception » [3, September 72] to justify his systematic recourse to right lateralisation.

For Tomatis, life has a meaning, a finality inscribed from the start in the organism, and any untimely intervention by the mother, in the laws of psychological development: anatomy is so made that it must naturally lead the subject to lateralise on the right, to meet the father. This path is the only one that leads toward a « normality » having all the appearances of Salvation; failing to take it, the foetus will be a stammerer,

dyslexic or schizophrenic, until the conditioning carried out by the Tomatis cure brings him back onto the « right » path.

The cure

Psychic equilibrium being proportional to the subject’s listening capacities, Tomatis developed a treatment method based on auditory conditioning: it consists in having the patient travel along an « ideal sonic itinerary » [13, p. 225] that begins during the gestation period and follows the main stages of growth. The cure rests essentially on sensitisation to high-pitched sounds and on the acquisition of a right auditory lateralisation.

The stages of the cure

Phase of intrauterine memorisation

It aims at establishing a good relationship with the mother, by creating the conditions that are at the origin of this relationship, that is, by placing the patient back in the foetal situation through the hearing of intrauterine sounds. Tomatis hears in him the emergence of the desire to communicate.

The first sessions consist in listening to the maternal voice « filtered » at 8,000 hertz, the sounds situated below this frequency being suppressed. This frequency was determined by plunging 1 microphone and 2 loudspeakers into a basin filled with water… « From the beginning of the filtered-sound sessions, the desire to listen generally manifests itself in the whole behaviour of the child, who awakens, demands, wants to communicate, is seized by an immense desire to live and to externalise himself, as if this psychoanalytic sensory memorisation allowed him to recover a past still virgin of all the conditionings of life, of all the lived traces » [10, p. 151].

Sonic birth

It consists of a progressive de-filtering of the maternal voice, from 8,000 to 1,000 hertz. These conditions are supposed to recreate the passage from hearing in a liquid medium to hearing in an aerial medium. « Thanks to electronics, the child will be able to live what, in a few sessions of stammering, will become crucial to this human existence, during the passage by which he should have been born into the world through his maternal relationship » [10, p. 152].

Pre-linguistic phase

It corresponds to the first two years of life, and broaches the lateralisation that must lead the child to the encounter with the father. Sessions

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of « The maternal relationship that prevailed until then was one-way. Henceforth, it is going to break apart before the desire manifested by the child to enter into communication with the outside », in order to escape the integrated dialogue with him, and in the passage from the unique to the process of socialisation. In this perspective, this phase appears as a prolongation of social insertion [13, p. 226].

Phase of sensitisation to language

The subject listens to filtered sibilants, to phonemes rich in high frequencies, which he will then repeat during the active sessions: « tic - se - le - this ». The cure ends with the repetition of whole sounds: filtered from 500 to 20,000 hertz, then with the reading aloud of texts. « When the repetition becomes perfect, the first phase will be over; the subject now knows how to listen, and as his model remains the one that was recorded. » Now, from the moment the dyslexic asks, it will be a matter of provoking in him the emergence of desire.

For example, listening like someone who has complete mastery of the phenomena of reading, he keeps close to seeing at the stage evoked. To cure is to arrive at « the auditory positivity of the well-heard, in whom a suitable relational network has been successfully established » [13, p. 242].

According to Tomatis, high-pitched sounds energise the individual, while low-pitched sounds exhaust him. As proof he points to the distribution of frequencies on the cochlea: the major part of the receptor cells is distributed in the high-pitch zone: 24,000, against only 2 to 3,000 for the low pitches. The latter, too few, absorb more energy than they provide. By contrast, high-pitched sounds produce a multitude of nervous influxes that the cortex would distribute in all directions with a view to a general toning-up.

Results

It would no longer be fitting to call « miracles » the assorted improvements for which one would be hard put to find a clinical cause. Recovery is akin to a rebirth, a true total mutation that takes on the value of a symbol: it is a kind of power to « change skin », after the patient has retained in a few paroxysmal « flashes » the salient stages of his development.

Tomatis aims at the fabrication of a new man, or rather, at the reconstruction of a human race on a highly linguistic model: with great reinforcements of superlatives, he describes to us the state of quasi-ecstatic bliss that he derives from the cure, and rediscovers all the flaw in the recovered joy and harmony. The child who comes out of a cure

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remains far the voice signals itself by relations between her and her son establishing themselves comfortably. The child had it afterwards, theory he had posed for himself a certain number of things to which she was not accustomed. Venerating mother the child between the light and plunges back against the mother into an intrauterine posture. Then the first seconds of theoretical unconsciousness of a point-blank death, thus are super-added in us, but indeed we do not activate ourselves so as to grasp it. In the end, he turns the light back on, returns toward his mother and a buttoning-up has its hours. This conduct being symbolic. It was a game of self-reference behind him a room that he should have created his traces — you see, my-mother says, it is about birth! Love I would not have thought it could go so fast… [3, no. 33, December 1972].

First experience of sonic birth

Tomatis filtered the voice of the wife of a friend of his in order to reproduce the intrauterine acoustic universe. He has the friend come, accompanied by his little daughter, to judge the result:

« We never tired of hearing those sounds so fluid, that sonic lightness that corresponded to the acoustic information perceived by the human foetus. Then I decided to reveal to him what I believed to be sonic birth. And

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all at once a voice arose in the room. It was the little girl (who had been listening) whose presence we had completely forgotten and who drew our attention in a manner worthy of a fantastic-film scenario: “I see myself in a tunnel,” she said. “I see two angels in the tunnel, two angels dressed in white!”

I continued in that tone, developing a veritable waking dream. Abruptly, the explanation imposed itself: the child was reliving her own birth. It was as if she found herself in the uterine canal (the tunnel) and saw the doctor and the midwife in their white coats (the two angels).

The child therefore continued to recount to us the journey she was making. After a few minutes no more doubt: at last she cried out: now I see mama! This time, there was no longer any possible doubt […]

What had happened was in fact in no way mysterious. By manipulating the apparatus, I had therefore just made the child relive the conditions of her birth, and thus achieved what I would later call sonic birth, that is to say the passage from liquid hearing (the foetus’s listening) to aerial hearing (the infant’s listening) » [13, p. 201 to 203].

Appendices

Sonic birth and schizophrenia

Test begun by Tomatis with a schizophrenic child who is cured by F. Debré. During a first session, he has him hear the maternal voice filtered at 8,000 hertz: « I did not yet really want to speak to him, but simply to have him hear filtered sounds, similar to the acoustic impressions the foetus can have in the uterine medium.

The child stopped crying abruptly, as if listening, to turn off the light. We could no longer see anything but a shadow taking hold in the faint glow of the devices’ night-lights. To tell the truth, hastened toward the half-light, settled on my knees, around him the arms of this woman, and he began to clutch his own; one might say he had placed himself back in his mother’s belly. He placed himself back, but it was now a matter of a dozen years, he dreamed afterward of her as if he no longer knew her. The tape ended, he stood up, turned the light back on, the session ended happily.

Eight days later we made an appointment, this time to practise sonic birth itself. At

Der Tomatis-Mythos

Starting from a simple method for rehabilitating the voice, audio-psycho-phonology, Tomatis (an ENT specialist) developed a therapeutic instrument that supposedly can treat a growing number of pathological pictures, from physical illnesses to mental illnesses. We can demonstrate how the scientific and ideological premises underlying his conception of psychopathology rest on intuition and magical thought and do not form a coherent theoretical model. We assume that Tomatis’s success rests on the fact that he presents himself as the man of providence, capable of bringing about miraculous cures.

El mito Tomatis

Starting from a simple technique for re-educating the voice, audio-psycho-phonology, Tomatis (an ENT specialist) developed a therapeutic instrument that claims to take charge of a growing number of pathological pictures, from physical ailments to mental illnesses. The authors show how the scientific and ideological presuppositions underlying his conception of psychopathology, based on intuition and magical thought, cannot constitute a coherent theoretical model. The authors postulate that Tomatis’s success comes from the fact that he presents himself as the providential man capable of achieving miraculous cures.

References

Barthes R. — Mythologies. Seuil, 1957.
Canguilhem G. — Une pédagogie de la guérison est-elle possible ? Nouv. Rev. Psychanalyse, 1978, n° 17.
Gribier A. — Entretiens avec A. Tomatis parus dans la revue Son Magazine (September 1972 to June 1974).
Gomez M. — Approche critique de l’audio-psycho-phonologie. Master’s thesis defended at the University of Paris VIII under the supervision of S. Tomkiewicz, Paris, 1979.
Hochmann J. — Pour une psychiatrie communautaire. Paris, Seuil, 1971.
Melado P. — L’audio-psycho-phonologie au service des chanteurs et des musiciens. Brochure distributed by the international association of audio-psycho-phonology.
Pages M. — Le « nouvelle relation : la psychothérapie ». Le Monde, 30 September 1979.
Pontalis J.B. — S. Ferenczi « … sans croire en… ». Nouv. Rev. Psychanalyse, 1978, n° 18.
Rosolato G. — La scission que porte l’incroyable. Nouv. Rev. Psychanalyse, 1978, n° 18.
Tomatis A. — Éducation et dyslexie. Paris, ESF, 1978.
Tomatis A. — La libération d’Œdipe. Paris, ESF, 1975.
Tomatis A. — Oreille et langage. Paris, Seuil, 1978.
Tomatis A. — L’oreille et la vie. Paris, Laffont, 1977.
Tomatis A. — Vers l’écoute humaine, tome I. Paris, ESF, 1974.
Tomatis A. — Vers l’écoute humaine, tome II. Paris, ESF, 1974.

Today: what the science says

The article by Gomez and Tomkiewicz is a polemical assault, written around 1980, which aims less to test the method than to dismantle its ideological framework — hence its verdict of « magical thought ». Forty-five years later, one can separate what belongs to Tomatis’s rhetoric (the ear as « seat of the soul », the « maleficent » mother, the « solar father ») from what constitutes genuinely verifiable claims. On the first register, there is nothing to adjudicate: no science grants any empirical status to these metaphysical frescoes. But the text also catalogues precise theses — the ear directs the voice, the « directing » right ear, the foetal hearing of the maternal voice, the cure by sound filtering — which can be confronted with recent data.

The coupling of hearing and phonation is confirmed in principle: vocal production depends on a permanent auditory control (auditory feedback), to the point that artificially altering what one hears oneself say immediately disrupts speech — this is the mechanism of stammering induced by delayed feedback, long known. The formula « the voice contains only what the ear hears » thus captures a real intuition. On the other hand, the « Tomatis effect » as a patented physiological law, and above all the idea that one could durably reprogramme the voice or language by « re-educating » listening, remain not demonstrated: the audio-phonatory loop exists, but nothing establishes that one « corrects » it through the exercises of the electronic ear.

Lateralisation for language is partly confirmed, strongly qualified. There is indeed a right-ear advantage in dichotic listening, reflecting the left-hemisphere dominance for language in about 80% of people — a robust fact of neuropsychology. But this advantage is statistical, not universal, and depends on the level of linguistic analysis called upon: it is not a « directing ear » that should be imposed on everyone. Tomatis’s deduction — stammering, dyslexia and even schizophrenia caused by a « left-lateralised listening » that one would cure by conditioning the subject « to the right » — is contradicted: neither stammering nor dyslexia reduces to a defect of auditory laterality, and making someone hear « on the right » is not a recognised treatment. Here one must hold to the distinction that Tomatis permanently blurs: to listen (an attentional, active act) is not to hear (a passive sensory reception); yet his cure claims to act on listening by manipulating hearing.

The foetal hearing of the maternal voice, long held to be fanciful, is today confirmed — but in a way that contradicts the physiology invented by Tomatis. The foetus does indeed hear its mother’s voice and recognises it from 33-34 weeks, and prenatal exposure to speech modulates the neuronal encoding of sounds in the newborn. However, the uterus behaves like a low-pass filter: it attenuates by about 30 dB the frequencies above 600 to 1000 Hz, and it is the low-pitched components (prosody, rhythm) that reach the foetus. Tomatis, for his part, filtered the maternal voice « at 8000 hertz », suppressing the low pitches to « recreate » the intrauterine environment: he therefore reconstituted the opposite of the real acoustic environment. Likewise, his corollary that high-pitched sounds « energise » and low-pitched sounds « exhaust » — argued from an approximate count of cochlear cells — corresponds to no audiological data.

The essential point remains: does the cure heal? Here the verdict is clear and unfavourable. The Cochrane systematic review on auditory training and sound therapies in autism — which explicitly includes a controlled trial of the Tomatis method — concludes that there is no evidence of efficacy, on the basis of few and small trials. The French health authorities have always classed audio-psycho-phonology among the alternative medicines that should not be promoted, and the method is openly classified as pseudoscience. A few recent studies report improvements in autistic or dyslexic children, but they suffer from methodological weaknesses — small samples, insufficient controls, heterogeneous measures — that forbid seeing in them a demonstration; Tomatis himself regretted not having provided more statistical proof. In short, the 1980 critique was right on the substance: the value of an initial intuition (the ear matters to language, the maternal voice counts before birth) was never converted into clinical proof of the therapeutic device that lays claim to it.

Sources

NEUROPSYCHIATRIE DE L’ENFANCE ET DE L’ADOLESCENCE

Source: M. Gomez and S. Tomkiewicz, « Le mythe Tomatis », Neuropsychiatrie de l’enfance et de l’adolescence, p. 681-689 (around 1980). Transcribed from the facsimile (scan without a text layer, OCR by vision). As the scan is heavily degraded, certain portions have been restored as closely as possible; the passages that remained uncertain are flagged in the text.