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Donnel B. Stern began his presentation by challenging the audience to consider language from the perspective of the “worded and the wordless.” We take for granted both our patients' and our own use of words, he said.
In order to differentiate worded process and experiences from the rest of our mental life, we might instructively divide our lives into two portions: the “worded” and “wordless” or “verbal” and “nonverbal.” But the difference between these terms is merely descriptive, bearing no functional significance. Stern contends that unless we can supply a functional difference to our language, then the meaning behind what we are “wording” is based more on assumption and less on its true complexity.
Stern focuses on the difference between words and wordlessness in the context of psychoanalytic work. He rejects the dichotomous dimensions of thought and act, interpretive and noninterpretive interventions, public and private experience, and thought and feeling because each element would force us into too narrow a view of verbal language. Stern states that language is not merely a set of labels; instead, it plays a significant, creative role in the construction of explicit meaning.
Like Freud, Stern believes that language alters that which it is formulating. But unlike Freud, for whom the unconscious meaning was the truest one, a hermeneutic view leads Stern to the conclusion that what we formulate in words is not a paler version of what it interprets, but that it bears a different meaning. Words create the particular kind of meaning that can exist only in language.
From a hermeneutic perspective, explicit or reflective consciousness is an interpretive act that we can understand on the basis of affect-laden conscious and unconscious commitments—commitments that may have never been formulated in words. The meanings of the reflective consciousness, although contained in words,