Further Thoughts on the Self's Language

WHAT IS AVAILABLE to the psychoanalyst for analysis is verbal. Typically what is analyzed is not the patient's dream but the report of the dream, the report of his inner experience. 3 Noverbal gestures figuring in the discourse between patient and therapist are also translated into verbal imagery, by one or the other, before they too are subject to analytic scrutiny. The language of experience is a transformation of imagery or fantasy into verbal interchange.

One might infer, then, that the structuring of unconscious forces is revealed in the structure of language. 2 The total language—communicative gestures, verbal and nonverbal—is the representation of these forces. When our patients relate their histories, they describe not so much the actual events as dreams or desires betrayed. Their verbal accounts refer to definitions of the self, the other, and the relationship between the two—as much as they do to real events. Words or their equivalents are containers of relationships between the speaker and some needed property of the object contained.

Through dreams, poetry, and fiction, what is out of awareness becomes personified dramatically. Interactions occur between fictive figures who, though moving with autonomy, are experienced as being parts of our own psyches. We respond with acclaim to that artist whose knowledge and skill articulate for us all passions, all dimensions of human life, and all of the mysteries of human existence with its possibility for change. Any play or novel can be read by the psychoanalyst as a dream (not the author's) with typical structure, plot, sequences, imagery, conflicts, and resolutions.

Dr. Chrzanowski has done us a service, for he has reminded us of the potential of literary materials for being useful to psychoanalysts. Heretofore, too often, except in certain circumstances of rare, genuine scholarship and insight, artistic works were scrutinized by analysts from three points of view: (i) the critic-analyst-as-detective p