Consciousness, Language, and Self

Psychoanalytic, Linguistic, and Anthropological Explorations of the Dual Nature of Mind

Michael Robbins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138487642
• eBook ISBN: 9781351039604
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Consciousness, Language, and Self proposes that the human self is innately bilingual. Conscious mind includes two qualitatively distinct mental processes, each of which uses the same formal elements of language differently. The "mother tongue," the language of primordial consciousness, begins in utero and our second language, reflective symbolic thought, begins in infancy.

Michael Robbins describes the respective roles the two conscious mental processes and their particular use of language play in the course of normal and pathological development, as well as the role the language of primordial consciousness plays in adult life in such phenomena as dreaming, infant-caregiver attachment, creativity, belief systems and their effects on social and political life, cultural differences, and psychosis. Examples include creative persons, extreme political figures and psychotic individuals. Five original essays, written by the author's current and former patients, describe what they learned about their aberrant uses of language and their origins.

This book sheds new light on several controversies that have been limited by the incorrect assumption that reflective representational thought and its language is the only conscious mental state. These include the debate within linguistics about whether language is the expression of a hardwired instinct whose identifying feature is recursion; within psychoanalysis about the nature of conscious and unconscious mental processes, and within cognitive philosophy about whether language and thought are isomorphic.

Consciousness, Language, and Self will be of great value to psychoanalysts, as well as students and scholars of linguistics, cognitive philosophy and cultural anthropology.

Chapter 1

Language and the sense of self

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Robert Burns’s 1786 poem To a Louse: On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church highlights the contrast between how we are viewed by others within our social and cultural context, based on a variety of evidence we give off, behavioral and verbal, advertent and inadvertent, and our very own internal sense of self, which is largely reflected in our language. As Burns humorously depicts, the two may be quite discrepant. In a non-dialectical English translation it goes like this:

And would some Power the gift give us

to see ourselves as others see us!

It would from many a blunder free us,

And foolish notion:

What airs in dress and gait would leave us,

And even devotion!

Language, as well as expression and gesture, is the way we present ourselves to the world, and along with aspects of mind that might be not be verbalized, is the way we know ourselves. The book presents the hypothesis that humans are essentially bilingual. The formal aspects of language – vocabulary, grammar, syntax, morphology – are used in the service of semantics to express meaning that reflects two qualitatively different conscious mental processes. For example, two formally identical statements may have totally different meanings depending on which mental process they are expressing.

By definition psychoanalysts are unusually interested in language. But perhaps I have been more so than many because of my particular interest in schizophrenia, a condition in which the language peculiarities with which the person frames his or her sense of self and the world are so strange that they are impossible to rationalize and hence to ignore. I have always been intrigued by some of the strange ideas of my patients and some of the equally strange ways they have of formulating them. For much of my career I more or less contented myself believing what I was taught in my psychoanalytic training that such things are symptoms; arcane symbols whose meaning is repressed and unconscious and whose meaning is to be explored indirectly through a process of free association and analysis of resistances that will eventually uncover the unconscious conflict that explains it all and in so doing reveal the underlying truth.

In time I realized that the central problem in psychosis is the failure of two processes essential to the creation of meaning: integration and differentiation. Some call the absence of integration fragmentation, others splitting or dissociation. The result of failure of differentiation is that in a psychological-meaning and not a formal cognitive sense the person cannot distinguish what is going on in his or her head from what is happening in the “real” outside world. The result of lack of integration is that contrary or contradictory ideas coexist in consciousness, hence the absence of conflict where in a mature mind one might expect it to be. And I realized that perhaps the unusual meanings were not so disguised and hidden as I had supposed but were plain to be seen if one grasped the idea that they were being expressed through a different mental operation and its unique use of language. In other words, the fact that the patient could not reflect upon his or her mental process in a mature way did not necessarily mean that the meanings were unconscious. Or to say it differently, the fact that the meanings were unconscious to reflective thought did not necessarily mean that they were not part of the person’s conscious mental experience and process.

My interest expanded to dreaming, an activity whose underlying primary mental process Freud believed to be the basis of schizophrenia as well, and not without confusion and ambiguity believed it to be the essence of unconscious mind and to contain the symbols of unconscious conflict. I began to question the belief that dreaming is an unconscious process and to formulate the concept of two different conscious mental processes and their respective uses of language in a series of papers that came to fruition in my 2011 book. Since then I have become increasingly aware that we only know about the strange ideas through the strange but quite conscious language usage with which they are expressed. I further came to realize that the strangeness may not be at all apparent to the listener as the two mental processes use the same formal vocabulary and sentence structure.

Some of the most unusual uses of language are on the surface so unremarkable as not to attract notice. For example, the use of pronouns does not mean the same thing in the language of primordial consciousness as it does in the language of reflective representational thought. Listening from the perspective of reflective representational thought which supports introspection and the assessment by one aspect of the self of other aspects, the first person pronoun “I” implies self-awareness or self-consciousness. However, in the language of primordial consciousness “I” only implies agency or activity; doing or a sense of being. From a similar perspective one assumes the use of second or third person pronouns refers to a differentiated separate person, but in the undifferentiated language of primordial consciousness it denotes part of the speaker’s intrapsychic self of which he or she is unaware and that is therefore believed to exist in the other person. Jacob (chapter 17) repeatedly said “you know,” “you believe,” “I think you are angry,” or “you think that …,” when as best as I was aware I had no such thought or feeling, and in the case of “you know” the information was often something I had never heard before. He believed for a long time that our minds were one, and was unaware of some of his own mental content. He often assumed that he did not have to tell me many of his thoughts because I already knew them. These distinctions are not obvious as persons “speaking” in the language of primordial consciousness believe they are introspecting and reflecting as much as anyone else, and because they are coming from a position of belief, they can be quite convincing.

Moving to more arresting specimens of language, Caroline (chapter 13) became enraged when an acquaintance, in what sounded to me like a conventional expression of farewell kindness, said “take care.” I eventually learned that Caroline heard not a good wish, but a concrete performative undifferentiated taking over of her mind compelling her to take responsibility for caring for herself; something that she was unable to conceptualize a right to differ with because she did not have a sense of herself as a separate person, and moreover, an idea that at core was so repugnant it enraged her. One of Caroline’s oft repeated phrases in the early years of our work was “nothing good will ever happen.” For a long time I took this as an ordinary language statement of depression and pessimism based on assessment of her unsatisfying life. Eventually I learned about her underlying rage, that she had never been able to formulate and represent as an emotion, and realized that she was making a concrete performative assertion of determination to destroy anything positive. Caroline would spend hours in scathing attacks on various people for not taking care of her according to her fantastic expectations. I came to realize that her reproach of others was an undifferentiated expression of a self-reproach for not caring about herself that she could not bear to acknowledge. Similarly her equally passionate admiration of other people for their maturity and responsibility represented an unintegrated part of her mind advocating responsibility that she angrily repudiated. She regularly wrote long “letters” to people she had little relationship to but was not able to differentiate from herself, often former caregivers, pouring out intimate details most people would feel ashamed to reveal. And we eventually realized that these reflected the belief she was actually evacuating aspects of herself she did not want to be responsible for.

Jane (chapter 14) got very agitated in the early stages of her treatment when (in the days I still wore them) I adjusted my tie. Her language reflected the literal belief I was masturbating. She, too, believed she could “tell” what I was thinking and feeling, sometimes from changes in my expression, many times from no obvious cues whatsoever. Although her professional writings showed unusual know ledge of such subjects, in her personal discourse she had almost no words for emotions or for body parts below her waist, and when she said “that’s just words,” she meant language had no bodily and emotional correlates. Her language permitted of the most fundamental contradictions so that at one point she seriously believed that if she shot herself in the head a flower garden would grow there.

Jacob (chapter 17), a man with a large formal vocabulary, had intense anxiety and verbal aphasia when it came to finding words to describe his inner life. When he was not busy attacking me he was paralyzed with uses of “maybe” and “I don’t know.” He “thought” in fragmentary pictorial images of body parts not linked to sequences of thought, accompanied by physical sensations and impulses.

He pictured me “sitting in shit” or began a session saying he felt like he had a knife in his pocket rather than being able to tell me he was angry. At times he said he felt that he had a breast, and he tried to brush it off. At other times he literally perceived me as a monster. These images reflected enactments of what we eventually identified as hatred he could neither integrate nor express in thoughtful language. Even when we had made some progress he would say “I’m making you into my mother;” not “You remind me of my mother.” Instead of talking about his sense of worthlessness he would say “I feel like a brown Jewish boy” or he would be convinced he had a fatal disease. As shorthand I came to say to him at these times “Please try to speak English” (tell me about your anger, etc.) and he would often say “I don’t like to know that …”, or “I don’t want to feel …”, rather than “I’m unhappy at being this way.” For many years we puzzled fruitlessly about a delusion that had ruined his early career in mathematics, namely the belief he could divide by zero, only to find ultimately that it concretely expressed his belief he needed to destroy everything important to him.

Charles’s language aberration (chapter 15) was not so blatant. He lived in a world of body sensations and images, some of which he came to describe to me, but he had no words for emotions. In lieu of knowing about his anger he experienced somatic constrictions in gut and chest, and he had the undifferentiated conviction that my attentions to him were critical attacks. When I encouraged him to express his feelings so we would know what they were, rather than withhold, he concretely interpreted “express” to mean that I was encouraging him to attack me, rather than to articulate integrated thoughts of his own as a separate person that we might discuss.

Lisabeth (chapter 16) experienced her mind in words of physical imagery. During an early separation from me she literally felt her arms had been amputated. She could not tolerate separations because she could not differentiate herself from me. I no longer existed as a separate person she cared about and missed and she no longer existed, either. Rather, she experienced a sense of catastrophe associated with the feeling her arms had been amputated, and would make comments such as “I know you never think about me over the weekend.” What she required was the belief that I was totally preoccupied with her existence so that I had no independent life whatsoever and we were not separate people. The notion of ending our relationship eventually, “terminating,” as I unfortunately put it in one discussion, was not only not a goal of hers, but mention of the very word threw her into a concrete physical-affective state of panic, terror and nothingness, as she interpreted it literally as execution and the end of her existence. I eventually dubbed the state “the trap door is opening,” in an effort to help her learn to reflect and use words to talk about it. Her self-esteem was abysmally low, and it was somatized and nonverbal. For a long time before she could conceptualize it as an emotional mental state all she could do was to tell me that she had diarrhea in the waiting room prior to our sessions. It was difficult to make any interpretive comment to her as the rage of which she was unaware was experienced in an undifferentiated way as me criticizing her and saying she was no good. As we began to make progress looking at some of her idiosyncratic language meanings she once told me “Don’t confuse me with facts.”

Our sense of self, “who you think you are,” is largely based on language – both our inner speech and the words, the linguistic structures that frame them, and the tone or prosody with which we articulate them. No less an authority on the importance of language and the unfolding relationship of language and self than the Judeo-Christian biblical account of Genesis proclaims, “In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God” (King James version). Ludwig Wittgenstein said “The limits of my language means the limits of my world” (1922, p. 356). Rizzuto makes the interesting assertion “I call the result of this process [therapy] the emotional history of words. The history of the individual with his or her objects, as the result of such a process, is so clearly written in the language used by that individual that I could paraphrase Freud (1905) by saying that no one who speaks can keep secret major portions of his or her life history from the ears of a good listener” (2003, p. 292).

As I use the term in the discussion to follow, language is Janus faced. It comprises the social or socialized face of mind as well as the private inner vehicle by which we come to know ourselves and our thoughts and become our own companions as we grow to be separate individuals. It is the music, harmonious or strident, with which we harangue or solace ourselves when alone. Language is also the primary vehicle with which we express ourselves within the interpersonal and social contexts in which we live. When given voice it is communicative. The communicative function of language, however, does not necessarily express intention that the other can understand. Although it may consist of intentional sharing with other selves, it may express motivation not to share and be understood, or it may simply be a concrete vehicle of discharge in and onto a world of objects. To make things more complicated, if the speaker is unable to differentiate self from other, whatever his or her conscious intent and whatever language he or she uses, the result may yet be solipsistic rather than truly communicative to a separately perceived other.

While it is evident that people from different countries and different parts of the world speak different languages, what is not so apparent is that there is a deeper language difference at the core of each of us, regardless of country of origin or residence. We each, and in varying individual proportions, “speak” two languages: a “mother tongue” that I call primordial consciousness, and a later developing “second language” of reflective representational thought. As a consequence of the vicissitudes of early attachment and individual variations in use of the two languages of primordial consciousness and reflective representational thought, each person’s resultant melding of language and its uses is unique. The sense of self associated with the mother tongue of primordial consciousness develops out of the undifferentiated matrix of the earliest efforts mothers and their infants make to attach to one another, affected by the innate mental equipment and motivation of the infant and the attunement and involvement or lack thereof that the primary caregiver provides in response. At the same time that language is the primary means by which we communicate with others as adults it is also the way we simultaneously psychologically reconnect with the primary other with whom our sense of self first developed, in whatever form, normal or pathological, that original attachment may have taken. As Freud so aptly put it, “the finding of an object is in fact a re-finding of it” (1905d, p. 222).

Though analyst and patient may speak the same language – English, Mandarin, whatever – in a formal sense, including grammar and syntax, and words that may naively be assumed to have shared meaning, what is communicated may not be what either party consciously intends or believes. Underlying what may seem on the surface like congruence in language-based understanding may be a deeper unexamined incongruence based on assumptions of the respective parties that they are communicating in what each believes to be reflective representational thought when in fact they may not be. The analytic encounter, focused as it is on language and on the transference, provides a unique opportunity to study what goes on beneath the formal language surface and to separate out the elements of bilingual self that are unique to each encounter.

In the pages to come I examine the origins of our bilingual sense of self in the context of the thesis that there are two qualitatively different mental processes: primordial consciousness and reflective representational thought. Each of these processes uses language in a fundamentally different way. In order to accomplish this task I critically review findings from psychoanalysis related to the primary process and consciousness; findings related to the attachment phase of early development and its role in language development and the formation of a sense of self, the controversy in linguistics between nature and nurture in the formation of language, and the relationship between language and thought. I present data provided by patients in long-term treatment who have gained awareness and insight into their own unusual uses of language and idiosyncratic senses of self to illustrate how, as a consequence of disruption and distortion of basic attachment during the earliest phase of self-formation the sense of self may become delusional. In such instances the language of primordial consciousness based on the original fusion of self and other persists, and the language of reflective representational thought which is realistically adaptive to a world in which self and other are separate beings, fails to develop.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• Introduction: The lay of the land
• 1 Language and the sense of self
• 2 Two conscious mental processes and their languages
• 3 Theoretical background of the problem of mental process and consciousness
• 4 Fundamental manifestations of primordial consciousness: dreaming and the languages of mother-infant bonding
• 5 The relation of mental process and language: the controversy within linguistics
• 6 The relationship of language to thought and the sense of self
• 7 Belief systems and other everyday phenomenology of primordial consciousness and its language
• 8 Primordial consciousness, language, and cultural differences
• 9 Emergence of the bilingual sense of self during the attachment phase
• 10 What characterizes language aberration?
• 11 Language aberration in relation to pathology of early attachment
• 12 Clinical methodology and data
• Patient essays
• References
• Index