Is there a nonverbal period of development?

Transformations at the Dawn of Verbal Language

In this essay the author describes some of the transformations that occur as one moves from preverbal functioning to verbally symbolic language. In preverbal experience, there is a direct connection between the sign and what is signified. An infant or child signifies displeasure by throwing his food or other objects to the floor. Much of the emotional tie between mother and infant and patient and analyst is communicated in this way. When a transformation occurs from preverbal to verbally symbolic language, as occurs in early development and as one interprets a dream, meaning is not merely translated, meaning is created. On acquiring verbally symbolic language, a "space" mediated by an interpreting subject opens between the symbol (for instance, the word guilt) and the symbolized (the experience of guilt) and a new subjectivity is created. On entry into verbally symbolic language, one becomes able to experience oneself in a qualitatively different way; one becomes both subject and object, I and me; one becomes able to experience a far broader range of feelings and types of thinking. Helen Keller's account of her experience of acquiring verbally symbolic language is drawn upon.

Play in the analytic setting: The development and communication of meaning in child analysis

Child analysts increasingly appreciate that play can stand on its own as a mutative process. When the analyst shares a child's "play state," her participation creates a transitional space in which a therapeutic process is enhanced. During play, children experiment with new, improvisational ways of sharing and negotiating meaning between themselves and another. The child and analyst co-create a new lived-experience that can be organized and integrated into a different narrative about the child and his world. This paper demonstrates, through a clinical illustration, how the analyst's participation in play works therapeutically.

The Intrapsychic and Interactional Realms: A Hermeneutic approach to Mental Space

This paper addresses the tension between Freud's emphasis on the intrapsychic world and the emphasis placed by the Boston Change Process Study Group (BCPSG) on real interaction. Freud claimed that the intrapsychic world is primary; the BCPSG claim that interaction is primary. Both assume that these "levels" are discrete domains that can be isolated empirically, and that interact according to regulative rules in the natural world. This assumption reifies the metaphorical concept of mental space and freezes it at the metapsychological level of discourse. From a hermeneutic perspective, we must put these metaphorical concepts in dialogue with the context-specific processes of interpreting the patient's communication and intervening therapeutically. It then becomes clear that (1) the meaning of the terms "intrapsychic" and "interactive" is context-sensitive; (2) the question of primacy is a pragmatic one that cannot be decided through metapsychological debate; (3) when we say that a behavior or mental process operates on the "intrapsychic" or "interactive" level, we are making a judgment call that is not based on reason (even if our judgment enlists reason in its support). These metapsychological constructs help us think about our experience with patients. However, their meaning exists largely as a potential and is never definitively determined.

Psychoanalysis as poetry

Like psychoanalysis, poetry is possible because of the nature of verbal language, particularly its potentials to evoke the sensations of lived experience. These potentials are vestiges of the personal relational context in which language is learned, without which there would be no poetry and no psychoanalysis. Such a view of language infuses psychoanalytic writings on poetry, yet has not been fully elaborated. To further that elaboration, a poem by Billy Collins is presented to illustrate the sensorial and imagistic potentials of words, after which the interpersonal processes of language development are explored in an attempt to elucidate the original nature of words as imbued with personal meaning, embodied resonance, and emotion. This view of language and the verbal form allows a fuller understanding of the therapeutic processes of speech and conversation at the heart of psychoanalysis, including the relational potentials of speech between present individuals, which are beyond the reach of poetry. In one sense, the work of the analyst is to create language that mobilizes the experiential, memorial, and relational potentials of words, and in so doing to make a poet out of the patient so that she too can create such language.

Play technique in psychodynamic psychotherapy

Imaginary play is often a child's best way of communicating affects, fantasies, and internal states. In play children are freer to express their forbidden and conflicted thoughts. Consequently, one of the best ways for the therapist to enter the child's world is to do so from within the displacement of the play process. For children who cannot play, the therapist's goal is to teach the child to use play as a means of communication and to create meaning. This article present clinical examples to illustrate how the author uses play in the clinical situation.

Interpretation domestic and foreign

Verbal and nonverbal behavior are on all fours when it comes to interpretation. This idea runs counter to an intuition that, to borrow a phrase, speech is cooked but action is raw. The author discusses some of the most compelling psychoanalytic work on the interpretation of action and presents empirical and philosophical findings about understanding speech. These concepts generate reciprocal implications about the possibility of interpreting the exotics of action and the necessity of interpreting the domestics of speech, treating both as equally dignified aspects of human behavior. The author presents a number of clinical examples to further illustrate these ideas.