Embodied Silence and the Hermeneutics of Trust

In Speaking the Unspeakable, Orange (2011a) offers an alternative way of conceptualizing the implicit—“as an adjective to describe the embodied quality of memory … what I once called “emotional memory” … referring to the enduring felt quality of a process of interaction … [a quality] usually difficult to express in denotative language [which] lends itself better to metaphor and to expression through the arts. … Emotional memory is primarily lived bodily, and constitutes the largest part of our life world” (p. 195).

By embodiment, Orange (2011a) means “the experience of the total situated living system … [or] embodiment as lived and living experience. When my patients says, ‘My brain tells me that it won't hurt me, but the rest of me knows that it will,’ the ‘rest of me,’ she goes on, ‘is the me that feels, that knows how dangerous certain people really are,’ [this way of knowing is] based on traumatic living memory.1 I respond to my patient that she knows it (whatever it is) in her whole being, in every inch of her body. … This knowing memory [italics added] may be more or less verbal, more or less explicit, and more or less conscious” (p. 196).

For Orange (2011a), the “unspeakable” means to designate “the effects of violence, torture, cruelty, or of dehumanizing and humiliating treatment in any context” (p. 197). Along the way, Orange asks, “… how do we psychoanalysts make contact with the other whose experience is not just unformulated, but unspeakable?; how do our violated and frozen patients attempt to speak to us, to get us to understand what they have experienced? Not for nothing is psychoanalysis the talking cure, but what kind of talk could

speak the unspeakable? One possibility is what I call the dialogue of metaphor” (p. 198), which she addresses in the remainder of the article.

In her discussion of Orange's (2011a) article, Corpt (2011) writes: “Metaphor allows the unspeakable to become speak-able t