The child who set it all in motion

Excerpt from the chapters “Aim and Method” and “Other applications and their results” of the book TOMATIS — Une expérience à partager (TOMATIS — An Experience to Share, by Juan Antonio Timor Pineda and Chaime Marcuello Servós). The accounts concerning children or patients are presented without naming them, out of respect for their privacy.

It was the support of a little boy, born with Down syndrome, that gave the authors the impulse to write this book. Diagnosed before his birth, he experienced Tomatis sessions from his very first months — his mother had herself undergone them during her pregnancy. The authors began to write when he was three and a half years old.

They take care to promise nothing. It is too early, they write, to draw any definitive conclusion about the long-term benefits. But certain developments seem to them too clear to be passed over in silence: better muscular tone, progress in communication, a growing capacity to enter into relation with others. Scientific caution invites one to set these connections in brackets; lived experience, day after day, makes them difficult to ignore.

More broadly, in the support of children with Down syndrome, the authors describe visible transformations: muscular tone that improves, walking that grows more assured, the gaze that changes, the expression of the face that comes alive and grows more personal. If the face is the mirror of the soul, they write, the more one leaves the soul free to shape that mirror, the more singular and alive the result.