Response to Commentaries

Why “Nonverbal”?

Fonagy is troubled by my use of the word “nonverbal.” He considers it a rhetorical device that sets up a false dichotomy and leads to a straw man argument. Fonagy is absolutely right, of course, that I chose this word to do something more than denote its standard definition, in particular to propel an emphatic argument about infancy, language, and psychoanalysis. He shares my view that the verbal/nonverbal dichotomy is not a useful way to categorize or label the different types of phenomena psychoanalysts are interested in. (Perhaps I did not make clear in my paper that I was discussing his theories precisely because they are so consistent with the direction I think we should be heading.) By contrast, “nonverbal” conceptualizations foreground the segregation of elements that are unified in and by language. Stern notes a movement toward more precise terms, such as Harrison and Tronick’s use of “somatic” (2011); because this term does not set up an automatic opposition of verbal and experiential modes of being, it does not necessarily foreclose our thinking about verbal involvements in lived experience. Yet at least some in our field continue to designate important modes of experience as nonverbal, as Stern attests and Bucci demonstrates (e.g., “there are multiple modalities of experience that operate independently of the semantic components of language throughout life” [p. 9]).

I also chose this word to highlight the developmental continuity of nonverbal experience that is central to the theorizing I wish to critique, epitomized in the work of Daniel Stern, in which the assumed nonverbal nature of infancy is perpetuated throughout life. The word “preverbal” (the term preferred by Fonagy and implicitly challenged by Litowitz) does not have this connotation; on the contrary, it foreshadows development toward a verbal mode rather than continuation of a nonverbal one. To be sure, our theories of infancy channel our theories of mind (Fonagy has misunderstood me on this point). Viewing infancy as a period of nonverbal development both perpetuates and fosters the conceptualization that verbal and nonverbal experiences are segregated throughout life and provides a rationale for clinical technique to address phenomena that are thought to be inaccessible to language. By contrast, viewing infancy as a period of development marked by vigorous contributions of language makes it possible to reunite the constituents that live together in language. Litowitz has eloquently elaborated the enormous implications of this shift in perspective for a psychoanalytic theory of mind. And once we dispense with the notion of a nonverbal strain of experience separate from language that perpetuates the nature of infancy (a seductive notion indeed, as Fonagy notes), we can begin to consider all kinds of interesting questions about what types of things are outside language and how those things develop and how they inform or infuse or interact with language, both in general and in the clinical situation. All of the commentators identify such questions in their remarks.

What is Beyond Language?

I am not taking the position here that language is everything, although I think this is true in just the way Stern and Litowitz do. But as I have critiqued others for building an argument for the primacy of nonverbal processing based on evidence of nonverbal phenomena alone, I would not build an argument for the centrality of verbal processing based on evidence of verbal phenomena alone. Instead, I am arguing that once it begins to be a mode in which a person can process the world, language touches experience in profound and influential ways; indeed, language suffuses the “multiple modalities,” to use Bucci’s words, that make up experiences of self and world.

The research I have described suggests that the capacity to process the world in a language-based way is present very early. Even if we reject my timetable for the development of speech processing capacities and accept Bucci’s (which does not take account of the most recent thinking and research I have described), we still have an infant who is using linguistic processing at the end of the first year, only halfway through the preverbal period. Contrary to Bucci’s interpretation, the fact that Fernald’s five-month-olds (1993) did not respond differently to praising versus scolding verbal statements when those statements were presented in the absence of typical infant-directed prosody (as well as all interpersonal cues including facial expressions) does not provide evidence of a non-verbal period of development. On the contrary, it provides evidence that there are limits to the young infant’s speech processing capacities and that meanings can be derived from speech in the absence of semantics. I did not and would not suggest otherwise.

Bucci cites the literature on grounded or embodied cognition, as well as her own scholarship, as evidence that there are strains of experience that are separate from language and suggests that this literature undermines my argument. Yet I have not questioned the existence of such strains; on the contrary, I see such strains as constituting the experiential foundation of language, as I have elaborated based on my own reading of that research (Vivona 2009). Importantly, Barsalou (2008), whom Bucci cites, makes clear that many studies of embodied cognition investigate cognition via language and that some theorists in this tradition, notably its pioneers, Lakoff and Johnson (1999), envision embodiment as the basis of both language and cognition. The presence of embodiment in language is a powerful argument against the view that language is an inherently abstract amodal code.

What is the Nature of Language?

In their different ways, Litowitz, Fonagy, and Stern share with me a view that language is there from the start in the form of parents’ speech, mediating experience and relatedness, creating the mind, formulating the world. All three commentators reject the idea of pure nonverbal strains of experience that can be known outside language and describe the ways in which language participates in the texture of lived experience and vice versa. Fonagy in particular elaborates the experiential components that are part of language, the embodied vestiges of personal and species history, and, on the other hand, is “at a loss to know how subjective experience may be accessible to exploration without language” (p. 5), as am I.

More than the others, Bucci emphasizes the separateness and distinctiveness of the multiple modes of experience, including the verbal mode; she envisions the modes of experience as operating along separate channels, with potential for partial integration. However, because “the subsymbolic components, which are continuous in format, cannot be mapped directly onto the discrete symbolic forms of language” (p. 12), there are limits to the degree to which language can be integrated with the nonverbal modes. On the other hand, this integration is possible because “there is in fact little evidence for cognition or language that is not grounded in sensory modalities” (p. 11). On this latter point, I could not agree more.

Bucci’s notion of words as discrete symbols exemplifies Stern’s discussion of the view that “nonverbal meaning always overflows its verbal containers” (p. 4) and thus that words “flatten” experience. He considers this notion to reflect not a limitation of language but a “limited understanding of language.” If instead of a discrete symbol or pointer a word is a multimodal memory, a confluence of remembered sight, sound, feeling, doing, being, and relating, then the scope of each word is potentially broad (as well as idiosyncratic, as Litowitz reminds us) and language has potential both to convey and to enrich experience, rather than only to flatten it.

We learned a great deal about the experiential, visceral, somatic, affective, and action-based facets of being once we began to think seriously about the limits of language for capturing and conveying experience. The work of Bucci and others has expanded our view of modalities of experience that are not inherently linguistic, and this has enabled us to ask new and important questions about the relation of those modalities to words. In fact, we could not have this discussion if her work had not prepared its foundation in the careful elaboration and delimitation of the different modalities that make up lived experience.

I do not wish us to ignore these other modes or to swing the pendulum back toward an old-fashioned verbal dominance. Indeed, my paper is an attempt to recast our categories, to critique the boundary between verbal and other kinds of experiential modes so that the boundary falls away and we can see their relation. I wish to encourage us to think vigorously about the ways in which language participates in these other modes of being, during infancy and throughout life, and to desist in defining language such that those involvements are obscured. Specifically, we should not continue to allow our interest in nonverbal phenomena to blind us to the inherent experiential foundations of speech, especially the kinds of speech we use in psychoanalysis. That is, when words are spoken by one person and heard by another in an interaction that holds and conveys meaning, at least potentially, then speech must be simultaneously experienced and imagined, concrete and abstract, immediate and memorial, action and representation. Language is always doing something; doing something is what language is for. Lived experience is at the heart of language, originally and thus potentially ever after. And language is at the heart of lived experience much of the time, even when words are neither spoken nor heard.

For me, language is an estuary, a confluence of salt and fresh waters; there are no separate channels, no obstacles to the merger of its different elements. The brackish water flows along with different gradations of salinity, the heaviest and saltiest water toward the bottom, the lightest and freshest toward the top. This variety makes the estuary a habitat for different types of creatures. So too does language provide habitats in which different kinds of experiences can be thought and expressed. Some language is heavy, salty, saturated with experiential meanings. The heaviness of experiential meaning may enliven the thought, as in the language of a poem or an effective interpretation or Bucci’s referential function. Or the heaviness may suffocate the thought with concreteness, as when words are more like actions than like representations or memories. On the other hand, some language is light and fresh, relatively free of sensorimotor heaviness. Such language is useful for expressing abstract thought and then it may be brilliant. But when such language denies its experiential groundings, it has “a lifeless nimbleness” (Loewald 1978, p. 190); it may be dead or arid, to use Stern’s word. Whatever its salinity, language is not tap water; it is not inherently or essentially or purposefully light and saltless; abstraction is but one of its functions, but one of the habitats it provides. And when we use language in a way that meets the needs of specific meanings in specific moments, we are doing our finest work.