The contribution of treatment by the Electronic Ear in a therapeutic setting

Communication by Dr Jean Raynaud, head physician of the neuro-psychiatry department of the Larrey military hospital (Toulouse), presented at the Val-de-Grâce Hospital before the Medico-Surgical Society of the Hospitals and Health Formations of the Armed Forces, during a session devoted to psychiatry in the military setting (circa 1977).

Drawing on Alfred Tomatis’s conceptions of the role of the ear in psychic life, the author sets out the therapeutic use of the Electronic Ear in a hospital department. The treatment, founded on operant conditioning, leads the subject along an “ideal path” from conception: filtered sounds recreating the intra-uterine ambiance, then “sonic births” from the maternal voice and the music of Mozart, and finally work on auditory self-control and right lateralization. The listening test, a repeated audiogram, objectifies the distortions of listening and their reduction. On a series of patients with varied profiles — adults and children, neurotic disorders, language disorders, lateralization disorders, scholastic delays —, the author reports a majority of results judged favourable: somatic appeasement of anxiety, modification of posture and voice, verbalization of conflicts, liberation of language. He sees in it a personalized semiological approach and a preventive contribution, notably in the child.

Historical context — From the 1960s and 1970s onwards, the Tomatis method went beyond the framework of speech therapy and pedagogy to gain clinical and hospital ground. This communication illustrates its introduction into a military psychiatry department, where audio-psycho-phonology is presented as a bridge between the organo-functional and language. It testifies to the institutional diffusion of the “Tomatis effect” within the French academic medicine of the time.