Commentary: Shared Voices: Commentary on Trevarthen and Bertau

I shall summarize as briefly as I can the basic points in Trevarthen’s (2012) and Bertau’s (2012a) thoughtful and persuasive papers on the cradle of voice. Then, I shall describe some of their similarities and differences, adding my own voice, first to the complex spectrum of mimetic phenomena—a crucial point in both papers—and second, to the process of sharing.

But before going further with those aims, it might be helpful to emphasize three points. First, to know the power of the human voice we have to hear it with the voices of the animal world from which it evolved, in the context of the special culture and language that constitutes the symbolic world in which we live, and in the light of the developmental processes that bring these two performances into concert in the life of each child (Bruner, 1990). In these interacting frames the dynamic process of sharing is constantly functioning. Second, other species communicate with their own “voices”¹, “narrating” to their con-specifics many vital messages. The meanings of these animal “voices,” often in ritualized forms, may be more genetically determined, than the referential or symbolic meanings of human symbols. The anthropophilic Cartesian suggestion that only “we” produce words, which, by means of syntactic rules, transfer creative ideas (Kimbrough, 2002) carelessly disregards the functional value of these older animal voices. Other species did not and do not need “propositional language” as we, for good or bad, learn to do. Third, in the long, evolutionary voyage the primordial voices of our ancestors were born, heard and lost, somewhere, say in Africa. In the course of time, the radical novelty of human language with its massive consequences evolved in our species. Like emotions, gestures and proto-songs, mimesis was “there” as one of the active midwives of language—all of them based upon the archaic process of sharing.