The challenge of Audio-Psycho-Phonology

There are several reasons why I wish to express to you the pleasure I have in inaugurating this symposium.

The opportunity to be among you is without doubt one of the main reasons motivating this satisfaction. You know indeed the special place that my wife and I attach to our friendships and to our relations with the University of Potchefstroom. Then, the possibility you give me of expressing myself on the subject of a piece of research that has occupied almost the whole of my existence is another, not insignificant, reason. Finally, the fact of inviting me to consider as a challenge the work that is being accomplished constitutes one of the surest ways of prompting me to take part in this gathering.

No doubt Professor Van Jaarsveld already knew my answer when he proposed the title of this address, knowing how much I delight in taking up and sustaining a challenge. It is true that, of my own accord, I would not have granted myself the right to embark on such an undertaking, if only because it did not seem obvious to me to think that my activity could have been felt as a real challenge.

It is therefore a wholly new illumination of consciousness for me that this request gave rise to, and the effects it was to produce were powerful enough to push me to make my thinking more precise, so as to situate, on the one hand, the whole of my work in relation to psychology.

To consider it, on the other hand, in its pedagogical dimension and finally to determine its status with respect to the medical sphere. I was thus given the chance to evaluate, to a certain extent, the contribution that this research had been able to bring about in various fields of knowledge.

It is obvious that I am at one and the same time the best designated person to set out and enumerate the various potentialities of Audio-Psycho-Phonology, a science it was given to me to elaborate entirely from scratch; but no doubt I am also the worst placed to judge the work accomplished, being myself too involved. Nevertheless, with age helping and with the daily advance into a better understanding of the mechanisms that govern the psyche constantly supporting the results obtained, it now seems possible to me to analyse objectively the whole of the work carried out. No doubt, on this occasion, each passing day reveals to me the privilege I have of growing old. Is not the surest means of reaching maturity to be found in the joy that is offered to us of advancing in fullness along the path laid out and within the limits of the time it is granted to us to live? It is then that knowledge is distributed to us about all things, with a generosity all the broader as we shall have been available and capable of receiving in order to give everything.

The quality of the challenge lies as much in the fact of introducing a new, unexpected, unusual impact, which disturbs or at the very least modifies the established order, as in the necessity of sustaining the effort over a long period during which the evidences fall into place. It is indeed necessary that this initial impact, a true impulse, be ceaselessly revived by new research proposals which must themselves be permanently reanimated. This is the law. Any propagation that seeks to continue requires that the initial effort be sustained without interruption. Everyone knows indeed that the problem of an impulse is to resist the effects of damping. It must spread out in time and space without loss of energy. We also know — and the occasion has been offered to us to observe it on several occasions — that any deviation entails secondary effects which rapidly provoke resistances due to the action of the aberrant systems thus built. Let us add that these latter most often end up cancelling themselves out thanks to the interference effects brought about by the entry into function of these abnormal mechanisms.

There is often a tendency to give the challenge the label of combat. It is true that the image is not too strong since it is, in fact, a permanent struggle waged against the preconceptions of men, and since it is also a ceaseless calling into question of the knowledge of the moment, so that at the end of the course one may, through intuitions and observations, reach the very place where everything is truth through evidence. But nothing is as delicate as stating an evidence, since it escapes hypotheses and, by that very fact, avoids all theories. It imposes itself by itself, without any axiom being able to tarnish its reality.

Looking at it closely, it is true that Audio-Psycho-Phonology is essentially and solely a challenge. From whatever side one examines it, it appears as such. And one only needs to enter its universe to be convinced of it.

It constitutes an apology for listening, for listening induced by language. Listening is indeed elaborated in a concomitant manner, and if there is language at the highest level at which we situate it, there is necessarily its response: listening. For it would serve the Logos no purpose to take its verbalised form if it could not be assured of being apprehended, to the point of being incarnated through listening.

Only the theologian will find himself at ease with such a formulation, he whose knowledge is constantly sustained by the leitmotif that places listening and the word in parallel. On the other hand, I conceive very well that the fact of claiming that language — considered in its most elaborate form, that is to say at the level of a true dialogue, is the inducer of listening and thereby of the ear with all that it represents on the level of cortical organisation, constitutes a challenge with regard to embryogenetic conceptions. These latter do indeed speak of inductions, but they look for them in the elements that mobilise cerebral activities and that trigger reactions step by step. Everything happens in this case as if elective potentialities, capable of playing the role of “organisers”, focused at certain locations. But the scientist is reluctant to make the leap that risks leading him towards the “major inducer”, origin of all induction. His rationality paralyses him and forces him to advance blindly, step by step, while he loses his far-off vision as the horizon recedes.

It is again a challenge to claim that listening leads the ear to become what it is. And yet an analysis over the course of time, whether it be the phylogenetic course or the ontogenetic process, reveals to us that the ear organises itself in order to gain access to this exceptional function which seems proper to man and which, in fact, is attributed to him so that the Logos may express itself. But such an approach requires that one envisage reconsidering the physiology of the ear and that one accept thus to go against the usual conceptions. The human ear functions in fact exactly the reverse of what is thought of it at present. The auditory organ is set in place through its vestibule and under the influence of the cochlea which leads it there, so that the brain may apprehend any sound phenomenon. Such a performance requires not only a well-defined postural attitude but it also implies that the human being place himself in a listening state, with every ear open, that is to say with the whole inner ear ready to enter into a total obedience with regard to this essential function, inviting its middle and outer adjuncts to conform to this dimension.

In other words, to listen is an act of high nature which arises from the most elevated function of the brain, called to integrate what the Logos reveals to it. This requires that a second adaptation be organised in order to allow the ear to acquire this particular aptitude. Henceforth, becoming an essentially capturing organ, in the active sense of the term, it enriches itself with all information at the same time as it benefits from the myriad stimulations that this postural attitude allows it to collect.

It is thus that it gathers not only the sound stimuli with which are associated the significant sequences it knows how to decode, but also the stimulations that the vestibular ensemble of the labyrinth coordinates. Thanks to the articulo-muscular and bony responses that the latter knows how to assemble, a whole interplay of antigravitational postural statics and of kinetic dynamics of movements is thus set in place.

If it is true that this new conception, which makes listening the major function of the ear, kindles and stirs up the interest of the psychologist, it is no less true that it very often encounters a marked opposition from certain specialties such as audiology and otorhinolaryngology. Confined for several decades within theoretical data that lead them into dead ends, these specialties remain paradoxically deaf to our approach. Engaged on false trails from Helmholtz to Von Bekesy, auditory physiology, although it enriches itself daily with numerous fragmentary pieces of knowledge of the highest interest, continues indeed to pose problems without solution.

Now, the theory we propose concerning the functioning of the ear inverts the polarity of these conceptions by attributing to bone conduction the primacy it deserves. It thus explains the results of the explorations currently being made in this field. Better still, it justifies them by revealing their belonging to one and the same functional unit.

It is also a challenge to claim before physicians that the auditory apparatus really behaves like a dynamogenic power station. But is it not a challenge solely because they have not yet thought of it? Zoologists, on the contrary, have long known this energising effect of the ear and know perfectly well that this function is a primordial factor. The challenge lies in fact in the necessity of breaking down the barriers that separate two specialties, so close to one another, however, on the level of physiological knowledge.

It is also a challenge, a challenge to linguistics, to claim that language, considered in its most elevated function, the one we have named the “language function”, turns out to be the principal inducer. Does not the linguist indeed have a strange propensity to introduce the inverse relationship? For him, language is the fruit of the socio-cultural environment. It is true that man is called to name things and beings, as Genesis stipulates with so much truth and poetry. But the speech function which allows him to respond to this invitation is only the analogical response of the language function, itself induced by an intentionality which surpasses all understanding. This surpassing in no way removes the value of the phenomenological response and can only flood us with wonder.

Examined at such a level, linguistics takes on a quite different aspect, and language loses its dimension as a tool, to be no more than a secretion exuded by a body which thereby becomes the more or less refined instrument of the language function.

It is also a challenge to claim that the ear is a captor of communication which not only integrates the speech of the other — which is easily conceivable — but moreover controls the speaker’s own discourse thanks to the elaboration of an audio-vocal loop which makes the ear — and in the most favourable case, the right ear — the regulator of a language fluidly expressed, easily controlled in all its parameters.

The challenge continues when one asserts that, through this interplay of differentiation concerning the preferential use of one ear over the other, an interhemispheric dynamic structure is organised. Thus overturning the concepts of laterality hitherto so poorly understood and so falsely elaborated, our proposition introduces an arrangement which reveals the mechanisms of the two hemi-brains. The one, the left hemisphere, will ensure the sensori-motor functions while the other, the right, will take over the control of the proper execution of these mechanisms. Thus the interhemispheric dialogue takes on a quite different meaning as soon as one attributes to the cerebral hemispheres concomitant and above all complementary activities. A double polarity sets in, allowing one to centralise, in cases of a high degree of organisation, the totality of the sensitive, sensory and motor activity of the whole body in the left brain, and to focus on the right brain the executive control of the totality of these acts.

As one can see, the concepts generally held on laterality find themselves thereby largely modified, language taking precedence over all the other activities which, although presenting great interest, are relatively minor in relation to this essential function. In our perspective, the body takes on a three-dimensional position in the face of the speech function. One axis represents verticality, that posture so indispensable to the elaboration of the verbalised act. A second axis guarantees the left-right dimension and allows one to measure whether the audio-vocal loop is dominant on one or the other side of this axis. On this regulation will depend the obtaining of what we have named the right voice or the left voice. Finally a third axis brings the postero-anterior dimension. The use of the body, envisaged essentially as a function of these three axes, reveals the manner in which language flows and allows one to detect the resistances which manifest themselves through malposition or poor coordination.

At the summit of this dynamic hierarchisation that is laterality, we can then say that the human being attains a true state of fusion to which one could attribute the name of ambidexterity to indicate that he becomes skilful (adroit) on both sides, contrary to the state of ambi-left-handedness (ambigaucherie) which indicates that the subject is unskilful on both sides.

On the basis of these various data, we have been able to maintain, by way of a new challenge, that the ear — under the dominion, of course, of the language function to which it is definitively subjected — was neurologically at the origin of the emergence of the nervous system. At the conclusion of the research we have undertaken in this field for more than thirty years, we have been able to bring to light the existence of three integrators: the vestibular or somatic integrator, the visual or spatial integrator and the cochlear or linguistic integrator (see annex document). These three great neuronal networks, which are at one and the same time sensitivo-sensory and motor, are placed at the disposal of the language function, which is going to express itself, in all the gestural and speech dynamics, under the impulse of the pyramidal tracts, true transmitters of the voluntary act.

These various challenges thrown out to audiology, to physiology, to neurology, to linguistics led us to emerge quite naturally onto what it is customary to call psychology, a discipline in which, it seemed to us, listening and language held a place of choice. The combat undertaken was not for all that any easier. The psychoanalytic tendencies accommodated themselves poorly to the technical and electronic contributions that constituted the means of education of listening and of language. Moreover, the behaviourist school rejected outright the symbolic reality that was taking shape at all levels through the affective family resonances. As for psycho-linguistics, it remained obstinately hostile to the new conceptions that made the language function the essential inducer of the human in man.

However, with the obstinacy that characterises us, we gradually approached the psychological sphere by introducing the data that experimentation and clinical practice allowed us to collect concerning the essential role that the ear is called to play on the level of the communication of the being with its environment. This communication I was soon led to place in utero, at the level of the first relationship, of the relationship of the foetus with its mother. Asserting then that the genesis of listening was instituted during foetal life, I threw out a new challenge, the greatest no doubt that it has been given to me to raise, the most fascinating too by the extensions it held on the moral level, on the level of human ethics.

It is from the embryonic state that life manifests itself in its language function for, this has certainly been understood, this mode of expression is that of life itself, inducing by its presence the being who incarnates it with force and vigour. The embryo is a being in its own right, connected to listening from the first spark of life. It is admitted today to consider that the foetus hears from the 4th-and-a-half month of intra-uterine life, but it pleases me to assert that the function of listening induced by the language function is instituted well before this moment. It is already determined, indeed predetermined. Such an assertion leads us to maintain that there is, in any act that takes a life, a euthanasia, be it pre-embryonic, embryonic or foetal.

This introduction into the life of the foetus within the maternal womb was, moreover, going to draw me into new audacities, into a new galley I was about to say. The mother-father symbolism became more and more evident and while the body affirmed its maternal carnal implantation, the paternal image took on another meaning by identifying itself, through semantics, with the first seed which participates, from the very start, in the spark of life.

In this bold perspective, I confess it, the right ear took on a quite particular sense, acting as a speech captor and thus attaching to itself the paternal symbolism as a vector in the direction of the social universe, while the mother took for herself the symbolism of the left, of the past, of the voice (and not of language). My various clinical experiences in this universe were not long in making the mother the symbol of the soma, of statics, of non-advance and even of flight, whereas the father remained the symbol of the future, of the dynamics of life.

Listening to the Logos, listening to the other and to oneself, the ear will be listening to the body. A last flight in this adventure novel will allow us to envisage somatisations at the level of a non-dialogue between the being who resides in each individual and his body invested with his personality. There perhaps we shall find the origins of illnesses and shall receive a new light on pathology.

The body indeed plays, at all moments and at all levels, a role of compensation with respect to psychological deviations. This safety valve avoids an introduction into the psychiatric world. Better to pay with the body than with the soul.

This new approach is incontestably a challenge addressed to ordinary medicine and an invitation to modify the existing structures so that illness and suffering may take on a quite different meaning from the one generally attributed to them. We must indeed change our attitude in order to understand the meaning of suffering more than the reasons for its existence, to go deeper into its causes and to draw out a teaching relating to a language hitherto undeciphered: that of illness.

In this perspective, any organ disease will appear as the absorption by the body of a neurosis, while malignant degenerations will translate fixations of psychoses.

We evoke here extreme cases in order to strike attention more forcefully, but we can also rank among all these psycho-somatic disorders the otitises, the anginas, the Ménière-type vertigos, the psychological deafnesses and finally the epilepsies, true self-administered electroshocks that the subject gives himself in order to put an end to a too-pressing pain provoked by a deep anguish.

Finally let us cite the allergies which translate, in somatic language, the speech of the body, not through suffering but through a too-great resonance making communication acute, in a relational dynamic poorly experienced, in fact too keenly felt, such as asthma, eczema, etc.

Now, it is good that we stop here so that at last, after this succession of challenges which form part, you must have realised it, of one and the same field, I may signify to you what Audio-Psycho-Phonology represents for me.

What then is Audio-Psycho-Phonology?

As is well known, the term “audio-psycho-phonology” is a neologism. It was constructed in bits and in stages. Indeed, the otologic surgeon that I was became, with time, a research audiologist. Then while I was led to concern myself with professional voices — singers in particular — the term “phono” appeared and structured itself in the form of “phonology” when I extended the field of investigation to language itself. Thus audio-phonology took shape and began its flight.

However, while my surgical scalpel was growing blunt and medicine was revealing to me its incomprehension in the face of the very meaning of illness, I was led to draw the organicist that I was towards a dimension hitherto unknown to me, that which concerns itself with the soul. I approached it without university conditioning. I confronted its immanent presence and its elusive materiality. I discovered it everywhere, in each character, in every individual, vibrating and resonating with more or less force.

An objective observation, if I may say so, of states of soul thus offered me its rich range all the more rapidly as its intervention became evident at one and the same time in hearing, which was to be transmuted into listening, and in language, which unveiled its real dimensions. These were soon going to manifest themselves by translating the deep accents of the being and not by expressing the verbalised tangles of a discourse plastered on and imposed by the socio-cultural pressures through which each individual learns to fashion his mask.

It is thus that I thought it good and necessary to replace the graphic hyphen that united the two terms “audio” and “phonology” with the substantial reality that the addition “psyche” could represent. Henceforth, Audio-Psycho-Phonology took shape, in the manner of a nebula that progressively densifies before becoming a true entity. A state of supercooling operated within me in a progressive manner and brought about, at a certain moment, a process of crystallisation which allowed me to detect the imbrications of this approach at various levels and in multiple fields.

One may of course wonder whether Audio-Psycho-Phonology is a science or whether it leads onto a philosophy. If it is a science, will it have to take honour in belonging to the domain of physics through its approach to acoustic phenomena? Or will it remain essentially bound up with physiology through auditory perception and through the neurological consequences that flow from it? One may also wonder whether it does not orient itself, rightly, towards linguistics, by playing in its various registers with the different elements of discourse, from the analysis of the quality of the voice up to the semiological resonances.

In fact, it is more than all that. It aims to re-establish the norms of an art of living. It is in this that it inscribes itself within the very framework of psychology, to the point of merging with it, in so far as one decides to give the latter its true status, to define its field of investigation and to revise its frontiers. It is at this level that I would like to make precise what psychology represents for me and what I consider must be the role of the psychologist in our society of today, so that we may, in the final analysis, find ourselves on firm ground.

For the moment, it seems to me, the status of the psychologist evolves on shifting, insecure terrain, with uncertain limits and inconsistent structures. Is it not true that, for some decades, psychology has been wandering along tortuous paths, without exit, dangerous to say the least. And the more it claims to enrich itself, the more it sinks. For it finds itself engaged on obscure paths, complicated at will, whose underground extensions attack the very foundations of human morality which they end up undermining to the point of destroying them. Furthermore, the dependence that psychology seems to feel with respect to medicine and notably to psychiatry risks making it lose its identity. It can certainly render service to psychiatrists but it is not for all that a specialty emanating from the medical caste. That there have been physicians who took an interest in psychology is a fact, but psychology must not for all that become their fiefdom.

It would occur to no one to formulate that psychology is attached to physics on the pretext that Wundt, Helmholtz and Fechner engaged in research concerning it. It is and must remain independent. Everyone can devote himself to it by bringing his own attainment, his cast of mind, his learnings, without for all that changing the status and the dynamics of this discipline.

Psychology must remain what it is: the study of the soul, that is to say the study of that radiance proper to each being which vibrates in every individual under the shell of his character.

As for the analysis of the soul, it is not to be done or, in any case, it must be envisaged under a different aspect from the one that currently characterises the psychoanalytic approaches. The meanderings of an unconscious that has difficulty expressing itself by itself must be ranked among the fantasmatic adventures of the individual, less rich and less poetic, it is true, than the millennial legends in which myths and mythology find their sources.

On the other hand, the bringing to light of the interposed screens which hide the underlying being remains the psychologist’s major work. The discovery of what are called states of soul is the very proof of the presence of these screens which prevent the glimmers of consciousness from manifesting themselves. And if it is true that the soul can be altered or tinted, it remains that the being in itself which it covers is by definition, by essence, absolutely limpid.

The work of the psychologist consists in detecting these alterations which contribute to the creation of a false character, painfully structured, ill at ease in his own skin. It is to the psychologist that the duty falls to proceed to the reactivation of the underlying potentialities of the being, hitherto stifled or never yet exploited.

If the current approach, diagnostic let us say, is excellent in matters of psychology thanks to the immense contribution constituted by the research carried out since the beginning of the century, it remains no less true that the curative solutions have not followed the same progression. There is too great a tendency today to confuse the elements of diagnosis with those of therapy. As if one claimed to cure a diabetes by doing a blood glucose test or a glycosuria three times a week, or indeed both at once.

It is at this level that Audio-Psycho-Phonology takes on its full dimension. It offers numerous and effective means to free the soul from its fetters. First of all, it brings an important diagnostic element through the introduction of the listening test. The latter reveals to us not only how the subject hears, but how he desires to listen. It is the level of development of this aptitude that will give us the key to the degree of insertion of the human who inhabits the individual and that will orient all the subsequent therapeutic action.

Next, Audio-Psycho-Phonology places at the disposal of the psychologist means that we can really consider to be of the greatest importance. To achieve this, it makes use of electronics. And why not? Some are repelled by it, others find an attraction in it. It is of course in a happy medium that the reality is situated, which nonetheless takes on the aspect of a new challenge.

It is indeed thanks to electronics that it has been possible for me to realise what are called, in matters of research, “simulators”, that is to say assemblies capable of functioning in the manner of… And while I was striving to deepen the study of the mechanisms of hearing, I oriented myself towards the realisation of a “model”. The latter is none other than an electronic complex which functions no longer in the manner of… but like the ear itself.

Our “model” has undergone, over time, as one may suspect, modifications as electronics progressed in its performances, but it was to retain over the years the designation of “Electronic Ear”. This “model” not only seems to obey the laws that govern the mechanisms of the ear, but moreover it has the power to lead towards a good functioning any human ear that has not managed, for various reasons, to accomplish its function of listening. It thereby becomes a true educator of the labyrinth, giving it at one and the same time its vestibular aptitudes and its cochlear perceptive dimensions.

As one can see, Audio-Psycho-Phonology thus broadens the field of action proper to the psychologist. It allows him to reinforce his impact and to revalorise his intervention. The role of the psychologist now consists in conducting the cure he administers while taking into account the stages that are to be crossed. At the level of the soul, he then proceeds as the obstetrician does in order to avoid dystocias.

The guiding thread of the cure under the Electronic Ear is suspended on the function of listening, a primordial, ontogenic function and the inducer of all communication. It arouses in the nascent being the sketch of the first desire, that of adhering to life, that life which the mother offers him in her pregnancy. From this initial encounter that our research has allowed us to explore with so much happiness, the whole genesis of relationship is going to be instituted, with the mother then the father and finally with the socio-cultural environment already inscribed in the parental dynamic.

Thanks to the cure which allows the subject to relive the ontogenetic line starting from the intra-uterine hearing of the maternal voice, the psychologist can then give to sensation its dimension of perception and, better still, of volitive perception.

One can see to what extent the role of the psychologist finds itself thus transformed. Having become a pedagogue of listening, he will be the guide who shows the road to the one entrusted to him, by revealing and removing the screens that obscure his horizon. He will thus give him the possibility of fully assuming the obstacles that existence holds in store for him.

Is this to say, from the angle of a new affirmation, that we make of the psychologist an Audio-Psycho-Phonologist? It seems to me that it cannot be otherwise. It appears to me likewise, with more and more certainty, that one cannot gain access to Audio-Psycho-Phonology without being a psychologist.

It is still necessary to make precise what “psychologist” is meant to signify. To be a psychologist is above all to love the other, to be listening to his soul to the point of feeling vibrate within it the breath of the spirit that wants to express itself; it is to be endowed with an intrinsic quality close to a state of grace. Without that, one is not a psychologist, even if one has in one’s pocket the finest university diplomas. There is no psychology without that intelligence of the heart, and one will be able to encounter it as much in the professional psychologist as in the physician, the linguist, the musician, the pedagogue or the educator.

One can thus assert that every psychologist, in the broad sense of the term to which we have just referred, is by definition, by essence, an audio-psycho-phonologist. The two universes adhere to one another with such force, in all points and in all places, that it proves very difficult, indeed impossible, to dissociate them.

But if this fusion becomes with time more and more evident, one conceives nevertheless that all this was not done in a single day. In all research, one must know how to wait. Alas, rare are those who can show such patience before acquiring the certainty of evidence. Many have seized upon Audio-Psycho-Phonology to dispose of it as they please and also at their own level of incomprehension. They thought it good to innovate when it was enough to let oneself be caught up by the facts in order to be able to go further. They thought it good to adapt Audio-Psycho-Phonology to their needs, even when it was fitting to conform to certain solidly structured laws, in order to discover adaptation.

But fortunately the path is open, and some who set out upon it amply deserve the title of audio-psycho-phonologists. No doubt the University of Potchefstroom, the very one that invites me to express myself today, is among those that have so powerfully contributed to bringing forth in me the notion of unicity that exists between Audio-Psycho-Phonology and psychology. By its patient waiting, by its long observation, by its prudent application, the Potchefstroom team has shown, over the years, that it knew how to follow the path laid out with rectitude.

There is no other observance than obedience to laws, to rules escaping all the axiomatics elaborated from intellectual constraints. It is in fact a matter of obeying, or, what comes to the same thing, of placing oneself in a listening state with regard to the fundamental laws that govern the human in man, that is to say those very laws that allow the being who vibrates and lives in each of us to manifest itself. This being will thus be able to act in full freedom. It will be able to radiate without hindrance, without there being interposed colorations or distortions operating like filters destined to alter reality.

Indeed, only creation expresses itself through the language power of its creator. Man will know only how to express what manifests itself to him, and his word will evoke with all the more fidelity what the Logos dictates to him as no existential interposition will come to tint his verbalised expression. At this level, and at that level only, his expression will be that of a true dialogue, from which will spring forth the evocations of symbols, synchronically marked out by an analogical language stated in parallel in parables. Any other discourse, a sort of more or less hypnotic conditioning, will engage in a low-level dialectic, without adherence to reality.

Certainly the flights into which I have voluntarily drawn you in order to show you the importance and the depth of the subject we have just broached express themselves through more prosaic tangible results, touching on daily life, on the problems of every day, from the simple scholastic difficulty up to the deep disturbance of the desire to live. These results will be the object of various communications and I leave it to the speakers taking part in this symposium to lead you back, through figures, to more pragmatic notions.

Does this mean for all that that everything has been found and that there is nothing left to seek? Far be it from my thinking. It turns out that I have come into contact with realities that have opened up to me a vast experimental field into which I have engaged without reservation. But I remain convinced that it is now necessary to ensure the succession and to form solid teams to explore this immense domain. It will assuredly take generations of researchers to discover all its resources. When one approaches a new continent, one is ignorant of its inner and underground riches. The whole point is to be certain that one is indeed on firm ground.

However, it was indeed in order to answer to the notion of the challenge and of the challenge that continues, that I took the problem at its real dimension, assured moreover that the proposition that was made to me, as I was saying just now, by our friend Professor Van Jaarsveld, assuredly had another resonance in depth, that very one which concerns the whole of South Africa. Indeed, who better than a South African can understand what a challenge is?

His existence, his commitment, his faith, his hope in a reality that approaches the absolute bear witness to it. Certainly it is easy to subtly introduce grievances into a positive undertaking in quest of Life. But it is the very nature of the human mind to treat with derision what depends on essence. For millennia it has been so, and does not the biblical “qadosh”, which seeks to designate the being beyond compare, out of the ordinary, the saint in a sense, evoke at the same time the image of the “fool”? The data of daily practice, so beneficial in their teaching, will have taught me that any positive idea is given to us gratuitously by the absolute with a generosity that surpasses our understanding, whereas negative concepts never germinate except on the culture broth of altered psyches.

Here I am arrived at the end of the course after this long address, seizing the opportunity, first of all, to thank you warmly for the so cordial welcome you have reserved for us, for my wife and myself, on the occasion of this symposium, and then to signify to you my gratitude for having allowed me to sustain, with respect to myself, a new challenge, that of having expressed myself in English before you. Perhaps it will be in Afrikaans next time.

Annex

The three integrators

The whole of the nervous system is intimately connected to the auditory apparatus by a whole functional network which comprises principally three great sensitivo-sensory and motor pathways that we were led to discover in the course of our research on the ear and that we have named “integrators”.

One can distinguish:

The vestibular (or somatic) integrator
The visual (or spatial) integrator
The cochlear (or linguistic) integrator

The vestibular integrator

Phylogenesis and ontogenesis invite us to consider that the ear, glimpsed as a sensory apparatus, is in reality only the external attribute of the primitive brain. Indeed, the latter is none other than the ensemble of the vestibular nuclei situated in the bulbo-pontine part of the nervous axis.

This attribute becomes the organiser of the static and dynamic relationship of the being with its environment through its vestibular part. The latter ensures the necessary stimulation allowing this primitive brain to be bombarded with as many “bits” as are needed to ensure the optimal potentiality of each species.

In other words, each labyrinth behaves like a true dynamogenic power station and ensures by its presence the energisation necessary to the whole of the nervous system.

This primitive brain, equipped with its labyrinthine adjunct, is going, from embryonic and foetal life, to induce the setting in place of the entire nervous system. This ontogenetic aspect, which the phylogenetic course easily allows one to outline, introduced us rapidly and quite naturally, I may say, into the universe of intra-uterine listening.

By acquiring the certainty of an auditory perception pre-existing birth, we were thus able to envisage multiple extensions of a therapeutic order.

The setting in place of the vestibular network allows one to institute a relationship with the environment thanks to an efflorescence of direct and crossed vestibulo-spinal efferent fibres and, upon the addition of the archeo- and paleo-cerebellum, of the afferent fibres of Fleschig and Gowers. These new cerebellar formations, adjuncts of the primitive vestibular brain, are connected to the latter by the vestibulo-cerebellar fibres which project back through the tecto-vestibular tract emanating from the cerebellar roof.

The ensemble is completed by the addition of two secondary brains, therefore less archaic than the vestibular nuclei, namely the bulbar olive and the central part of the red nucleus, including of course their olivo-spinal and rubro-spinal tracts. This ensemble forms a totality that we have named the “somatic vestibular integrator”. It alone constitutes the apparatus which allows the sketch of the body image to be consolidated, while it ensures at the same time, and in an efficient, operational manner, the statics and the dynamics of movement, that is to say the kinetics, in the surrounding environment, whether it be uterine or whether it relates to the post-natal external world. One sees how this ensemble prepares the bodily instrument that will subsequently be attributed to language.

The visual integrator

An appreciable addition will be the one we have named the “visual integrator” and which for a time, the space of a few million years — so little, in fact, before eternity — will seize hold of the vestibular integrator and render it dependent. It is thus that the animal will move about visually guided. Yet the labyrinth then rectifies this situation and becomes prevailing again, obliging the hitherto dominant visual analyser to place itself at its service. From the appearance of mammals, the labyrinthine intervention, already acting and organising in the embryological sense of the term, makes itself felt. And the regulating commands operate at one and the same time at the level of the anterior roots of the spinal cord and at the bulbo-pontine level through the vestibulo-mesencephalic tracts which command, from that moment, the motor nuclei of the VIth, IVth and IIIrd cranial pairs, origins of the motor nerves of the eye. This last acquisition is accompanied by an increasing mobility of the eyeballs to the point of instituting binocular vision in the anthropoids. This stage is the fruit of a powerful labyrinthine vestibular action on the visual integrator. The body image, already sketched and, by that fact, largely reinforced, will allow the being not only to situate itself in the ambient environment, but also to apprehend the latter.

The cochlear integrator

Finally, in a last stage answering not to an evolution, but to the realisation of a high-level inducing structure — and it is to the language function itself that we are thinking — the vestibular labyrinth (that is to say the utricle with the semicircular canals and the saccule), which operates like a gyroscope governing equilibrium, sees itself attributed the cochlea, a true sextant which will impose on it a definite position with a view to increasing its efficiency and thereby to acquiring verticality. This latter makes of man an antenna — a neurological antenna — capable of translating analogically into speech function what the language function reveals to it. To do this, verticality is necessary so that the body becomes the sensori-motor receptacle of the verbalised expression. For speech to be incarnated, it is necessary and indispensable that language be integrated in a motor and sensory manner. It is the whole body that speaks. But it is also the body that soaks up, that imbues itself, that memorises. Memory is the result of a psycho-sensori-motor induction.

By its appearance in the organisation — in the embryological sense of the term — the cochlea determines the cerebral ampliation. The extrapyramidal areas become considerable and are going to project onto the cerebellum more elaborate motor counter-reactions, through the temporo-ponto-cerebellar, fronto-ponto-cerebellar, parieto-ponto-cerebellar tracts, and through their cerebello-dentato-rubro-thalamo-cortical return, with the sensory counter-reactions through the spino-thalamic tracts and the tracts of Goll and Burdach. We are thus in the presence of what we have named “the cochlear integrator”.

Through this last, the brain is entirely connected with the cerebellum, which thus reveals to us more explicitly its role as a relay station, a true connection box which allows the labyrinth to gather the whole of the somatic responses directly projected or previously corticalised. Thus, enriched with the whole of this information, the labyrinth will be able to coordinate and to regulate cybernetically all the bodily statics and gestures, whether spontaneous or imposed on it by the decision of the voluntary act through the pathway of the pyramidal tracts.

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Source: Alfred A. Tomatis, “Le défi de l’audio-psycho-phonologie”, inaugural lecture of the Audio-Psycho-Phonology symposium, Christian University of Potchefstroom (South Africa). Transcription from the facsimile (digital restoration by Francis Besson, 2012).