Listening that's life!

The English edition of L’écoute, c’est la vie — the same brisk synthesis of the Tomatis Method, in the language that carries it furthest. It is the best-stocked title on our list: if you are looking for a book to give an English-speaking colleague, this is the one.

“The purpose, if there is one, is to know how to listen.”

— Alfred Tomatis, quoted by the author

About the book

A clinical psychologist trained by Tomatis himself, Patrick Dumas de la Roque sets down in a hundred and fifty pages a body of work reputed to be impenetrable. The founding distinction — hearing is passive, listening is an act — is held from the first page to the last, which is not so common in the English-language literature on the method.

The book reads in two movements: first the theory (the Tomatis laws, the functions of the ear, the ear that recharges the brain, listening in the womb, the listening test, Mozart); then the clinical work, through case studies — learning difficulties, autism, adoption, singing, language learning, pregnancy, depression, Ménière’s vertigo.

Foreword by Léna Tomatis and preface by Christophe Besson, in which he recounts his 1991 meeting with Alfred Tomatis and the genesis of the Oreille Électronique Besson®.

Who it is for

English-speaking practitioners and centres, students, parents, teachers. This is the book you enter the method through: to be read before Pierre Sollier’s treatise, which is fuller and more demanding.

Published with the support of the F.I.A.P.E. Translated from the French edition of 2014.