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It is quite probable that Consciousness, Language, and Self has been assigned to me for review because I have established a foothold on the vast literature in linguistics and I’ve attempted to apply some of its modelling to the study of psychoanalysis. I, like Michael Robbins, have tried to illuminate some of what psychoanalysts do with patients and to discover what areas of theory can be tapped to better explain the “wordsmith” of analysts interacting with analysands of varied stripe. Robbins’ book covers some of this ground, but most importantly his rich volume addresses a reference group of patients that is very different from at least my own, and I believe that of most psychoanalysts. Robbins treats some very sick patients with diagnoses that span psychoses (likely schizophrenia), paranoid conditions, and Borderline Personality Disorder. He is thus enticed to see if new linguistic and biologically-based brain studies can enhance his grasp of what goes on in the minds
of these more than neurotic humans. Is there more, or something other, that must be included to create a theory that he hopes will aid to understanding his subjects? We may recognize his study population as even stranger than Otto Kernberg’s Borderlines, more narcissistic than Kohut’s subjects, and most likely akin to earlier descriptions found in the work of von Reichman, Sullivan, Searles, etc.
Robbins elaborates his model of the mechanisms and functional variations that would be necessary and sufficient for these otherwise unusual human subjects to act as they do when they reject, avoid, or withdraw from society, or are removed in the old fashioned way by alienists in asylums. He augments his volume with a section of five written contributions by the very subjects he describes in this section. During his descriptions of how far he must reach to find a satisfactory theoretical niche to further understand his patients, he offers an excellent recounting of the bicameral brain as described by the n