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The study of language and its impact on human development has been a dominant theme in twentieth-century intellectual thought.
Research on early infancy (Brazelton & Cramer, 1991; Lichtenberg, 1983; Stern, 1985) suggests that the newborn communicates from the very beginning of life its readiness for interaction, or, more accurately, that the mother takes the baby's expressions as such readiness. The visual contact with her baby provides the mother with a coherent model of shared responses. On this basis, the mother's verbal and nonverbal communications become “conversation games” (Stern, 1985). Within the framework of constant interaction, attunement allows many forms of body language, such as nonverbal vocalizations, expressions of recognition of the voices of people around, the gradual comprehension of verbal signals and, finally, verbalization itself, to unfold on the basis of an infrastructure of deep empathic contact, which may correspond to primary maternal preoccupation (Winnicott, 1956) and to the mother's capacity for reverie as “the receptor organ for the infant's harvest of self-sensation gained by its conscious” (Bion, 1962, p. 116).
Bollas (1989, 1992) has maintained that the infant learns “the grammar of its being” much before learning the rules of language. But in what ways does that “grammar of being” affect “the grammar of language”? Furthermore, what are the relations between the early “grammar of being” and the very ability to establish a psychic grammar or a psychic language?
This paper is an attempt at rethinking those patients who, for reasons linked to early trauma, are unable to establish a psychic language, that is, construct only a concrete one, or adversely construct