Playing with Boundaries

IF ONE VIEWS THE NORMAL PROCESS of human personality functioning as a shifting configuration of multiple self-states (what Freud calls “part-egos”), a correspondence emerges between the psychodynamics

of two seemingly distinct relationships, reader-author and patient-analyst, each involving an ongoing dialectic between the multiple realities of both people at the interface of language and selfhood. Eva Hoffman, in her 1989 book with the wonderful title Lost in Translation, writes:

I love words insofar as they correspond to the world, insofar as they give it to me in heightened form. The more words I have, the more distinct, precise my perceptions become—and such lucidity is a form of joy. Sometimes, when I find a new expression, I roll it on the tongue, as if shaping it in my mouth gave birth to a new shape in the world. Nothing fully exists until it is articulated. “She grimaced ironically,” someone says, and an ironic grimace is now delineated in my mind with a sharpness it never had before. I've grasped a new piece of experience; it is mine. [pp. 28-29]

When it comes to words about one's “self,” however—and this is a big however—especially when the words are coming out of the mouth of one's analyst, “loving” them is a somewhat more complicated piece of business. It's not as simple as taking them in, rolling them on your tongue, and grasping a new piece of self-experience. The feeling “it is mine” that Hoffman so poignantly describes doesn't translate that neatly into “it is me.” In order for new words about one's self to be pleasurable, those new words have to be acceptable to a self for whom the old words are still defining reality, and are therefore initially received from an adversarial perspective by at least one part of the self, sometimes with grave misgiving, sometimes with outright antagonism, and sometimes even with rage. The old words, and the self-meaning that those old words define, constitute one's internal self-narrative. To use Eva Hoffman's languag