Transformations at the Dawn of Verbal Language

Signs and Symbols

I will be using the term sign to refer a communication in which there is a direct relationship between an element of expression (a sign) and what it refers to (a content). For instance, the shape of horseshoes in the snow is a sign indicating that a horse or horses have been there.

By contrast, a symbol does not bear a direct relationship to what it names or refers to. For instance, the word bird or the letters b-i-r-d (symbols) bear no relationship to the animal they name (the symbolized). The preverbal symbolization of infants is based on signs (direct relationship to what is referred to), for example, the baby’s shriek indicates that she is in pain and her throwing food to the floor indicates the displeasure or frustration she is feeling.

Freud (1900a, 1900b, 1915) envisioned the system preconscious as the part of the topographic model of the mind that transforms preverbal symbolization (for example, unconscious ideation and the visual imagery of dreaming) into verbally symbolic language that is used in conscious, secondary process thinking. Conscious thinking is based on cause-and-effect logic in diachronic (sequential) time. Ever present in the psyche, as Freud envisioned it, is pressure from the preverbal, repressed unconscious to enter the conscious domain in such forms as forgetting, confusion, symptom formation, humor, and the background colorations and intensities the unconscious lends to consciousness. The use of verbally symbolic language and conscious secondary process thinking are seen by Freud as yielding the capacity for self-reflection which forms the basis for a therapeutic analytic process that occurs within the individual and within the analytic setting.

Segal (1957) offers a psychoanalytic perspective on the relationship between what she calls “symbolic equation” (p. 395) and “symbol formation proper” (p. 395). These forms of symbolization are roughly equivalent to the linguistic categories of symbolization in the forms of signs and symbols, respectively. Symbolic equation is preverbal and associated with the paranoid-schizoid position (in which one relates to primitive part objects), while the latter, symbol formation proper, is associated with the depressive position (in which one relates maturely to whole objects). Segal posits that in a state of mind in which symbolic equation is dominant, the experience of playing the violin may be equated with masturbating, so the individual would not play the violin in public. By contrast, when symbol formation proper is dominant (in the depressive position), the symbol (for instance, playing the violin) may serve as a representation of an unconscious sexual phantasy concerning masturbation, but the phantasy is not experienced as identical to the act of playing the violin. Their relationship is symbolic.

For Winnicott (1949), the infant at the start lives in a state of “going on being” (p. 245). The phrase going on being (a phrase without a subject) designates a state in which the infant has not yet achieved a sense of I-ness interacting with otherness. In a state of going on being, subjectivity (a sense of I-ness) is held for the infant by the mother. For Winnicott (1968), preverbal forms of communication between mother and infant and patient and analyst are at times more expressive than verbally symbolic communication:

A patient dug her nails into the skin of my hand at a moment of intense feeling. My interpretation was “Ow!” This scarcely involved my intellectual equipment at all, and it was quite useful because it came immediately, (not after a pause for reflection) and because it meant to the patient that my hand was alive, that it was part of me, and that I was there to be used. (p. 95)

Here Winnicott illustrates the way in which preverbal communication (“Ow”) carries meaning (“my hand was alive, that it was part of me”) more effectively than could be done in verbally symbolized communication (derived from self-reflection). This forms the basis for Winnicott’s cautioning analysts to restrain themselves from offering interpretations (verbal symbolizations of and understanding of the patient’s experience) and instead to allow the patient the joy of the experience of discovering meaning on his or her own (Winnicott 1969, p. 86).

Before verbally symbolic language is established, mother and infant communicate in what Grotstein (personal communication, 2015) calls “baby talk,” a language in which needs, affection, frustration and much else is communicated in the form of a multitude of signs: a dreamy look in one’s eyes, the molding of bodies, a quality of sucking at the breast and of cries in the night, and “a thousand ways that compare with the infinite variety of poetry” (Winnicott 1968, p. 95). And it is difficult not to hear in this preverbal communication the first experience of music. (See Litowitz 2011 for a discussion of preverbal communication in the mother-infant relationship and in the relationship between patient and analyst.)

The Domain of Verbally Symbolic Thought

With the development of verbally symbolic thought a new world of experience opens to us. ² We can create symbols not only for objects (names such as tree, car, and airplane), but also for feeling states (jealousy, guilt, compassion) as well as for abstract ideas (time, death, the solar system). Having names for things, feelings, and ideas changes everything.

With the development of the capacity for verbal language a more complex subjectivity is generated. In this subjectivity, the subject, in the process of verbally symbolizing, occupies the “space” between the symbol and the symbolized. The individual becomes the interlocutor of his own experience, the person in charge of using the vast set of words (verbal symbols) to construct meaning that defines himself and the world. With the achievement of verbal language, “I” as subject and “me” as object are created in the same moment. There can be no object (me) without an “I” to observe it, and there can be no “I” without otherness (me as object). Otherness takes the form of me-as-object and the form of everything that is not-me (see Ricoeur 1995).

With verbal language, one is not only able to communicate with others in words, one also thinks in words. One becomes able to think about oneself and about one’s thinking. A world is created in which things do not simply happen; instead, things happen to an observing self whose perceptual apparatus is his and his alone. Each individual is the interpreting center of his own universe. Everything that happens is not simply happening (as in dreaming and other forms of preverbal experience), thing are happening to a subject capable not only of perception, but of apperception (understanding what is happening by integrating experience into a set of ideas one already has). I, a self-reflective entity, am experiencing what is happening and trying to make sense of it.

A doll, for a preverbal infant or small child, is an entity into which she has projected an aspect of her internal world. For the infant or child, the doll becomes a container or personification of the infant’s or child’s internal state. The doll may be happy or sad, awake or asleep, hungry or full, and in any other state the child has experienced. The feelings and movements of the doll bear a direct relationship with what the child attributes to it. There is no interpreting subject mediating between the doll and the states being attributed to it. What you see is what you get—a doll happily dancing is a living figure, much like the child, feeling happy.

Verbally symbolic language, by contrast, not only names experience, it creates the possibility of experiencing one’s life in a qualitatively different way. Not only do a far broader set of emotions become possible, subjectivity itself is qualitatively altered. One is able to have such experiences as reflecting on a choice one has made, regretting what one has said, not knowing why that never came to mind, seeing the connection between the manifest and the latent aspects of oneself or someone else. The new subjectivity involves a complex relationship between oneself as subject (I) to oneself as object (me). One experiences an ever shifting relationship (often a disjunction) between one’s sense of who one is and the actual way one thinks, feels, and behaves. Such experiences cannot occur to the preverbal infant of child. The mother adjusts to the infant’s psychic state of mind in which subject and object, I and me, are not yet clearly differentiated by speaking to the infant with language that does not differentiate between subject and object. She speaks as if she were an object (not a subject) by referring to herself in the third person: “Mommy is happy” or “Mommy is leaving.”

Before the development of verbally symbolic language, the infant is able to perceive a dog, but there is not yet the idea of a dog, which involves a conception not only of a dog but a conception of oneself thinking of a dog. To create the idea of a dog there must be a subject mediating between the perceived dog and the general category of dogs. In a preverbal era of experience, the family dog is the family dog, not a subset of the concept of animals and living things and dead things. For the preverbal infant, seeing his mother crying can be experienced only in terms of the range of feelings the infant is able to experience; the experience of the mother crying cannot be thought about, it can only be reacted to.

In verbally symbolic thought, one is able to experience feelings of compassion, sadness, despair, guilt, melancholia, and mourning. The infant is able to respond to experience on a visceral level but cannot create affective response with the nuance of verbally symbolic language. The nature of experience in a preverbal world involves a visceral flow along dimensions, more or less, of good or bad, safe or dangerous, hungry or sated, happy or sad.

The Creation of Meaning

The psychic changes that occur as the individual acquires verbally symbolic language are addressed with particular lucidity by the Brazilian analysts E.M. Rocha Barros (2000, 2018) and E.L. Rocha Barros (Rocha Barros and Rocha Barros 2018). They build upon Cassirer’s (1944) and Langer’s (1942) work on the philosophy of language:

In the act of interpreting [a dream] . . . we transmute one symbolic basis—in this case the language expressive of the visually symbolic experience of the dream or reverie—into another symbolic basis, that of verbally symbolic interpretation . . . Meaning is not only named by interpretation of dreams and reveries, it is created [italics added] in the transmutation from one symbolic basis to another. (Rocha Barros 2018, p. 228)

E.M. Rocha Barros is referring here to the process in which the individual on waking, begins to understand (interpret) his own dreams by transforming them into verbally symbolic form. With the capacity for verbal language, the individual, on awaking from a dream, is able to talk with him- or herself or with someone else about the dream. For a psychotic patient, a dream is what it is; it is indecipherable from a hallucination. For a nonpsychotic patient, a dream while being dreamt, is what it is. It is a preverbal imagistic experience. But on waking, when the dreamer is capable of verbally symbolic thoughts, the dream is a symbolic communication between different aspects of oneself.

Grotstein (1979) and Sandler (1976) have proposed that unconscious understanding of dreams and consequent psychic growth occur by means of communication between different aspects of the unconscious mind. Verbally symbolic thought or something akin to it occurs in communication between what Grotstein calls “the [unconscious] dreamer who dreams the dream” and “the [unconscious] dreamer who understands the dream” (p. 110) and what Sandler calls the unconscious “dream-work” and “understanding-work” (p. 40). These contributions account for the value to the individual, in terms of potential contribution to psychic growth, of all the dreams one dreams but is unable to remember.

The capacity for verbally symbolizing one’s experience (including the dreams one remembers) creates a sea change in the experience of oneself in relation to one’s dreaming. Not only is the meaning of the dream created when transformed into verbally symbolic form, the experience of oneself in relation to the dream is newly created. What had been an experience in which what you see is what you get, becomes an experience in which an I-me dialectic is established: dreaming becomes differentiated into “me” (the dream as object to be understood) in relation to the interpreting subject (“I”) who is doing the work of understanding. (See Hook 2002 for a discussion of the I-me dialectic as constructed in the process of speech.)

When speaking of the experience of acquiring verbally symbolic language, it is important to distinguish between: the meaning that is created, on the one hand, and the experience of creating meaning, on the other. These two aspects of experiencing are inseparable. The meaning that is created holds significance in what I call the epistemological dimension of psychoanalysis, the dimension having to do with coming to understand oneself and the world in which one lives. In contrast, the experience of creating meaning is an aspect of what I call the ontological dimension of the analytic process, the dimension having to do with being and becoming more fully oneself (Ogden 2019, 2020, 2024). When an analyst offers an interpretation of a dream, the patient may find the experience valuable in arriving at an understanding of an aspect of himself that has felt disconnected and lifeless. For another patient, that same interpretation may be significant, not as an enhancement of self-understanding, but as an experience of being recognized and understood for who she is. The meaning created is verbally symbolized; the experience of creating meaning is predominantly preverbal. The two—the meaning created and the experience of creating meaning—are inseparable aspects of the therapeutic value of analytic experience.

In the analytic situation, I conceive of the analytic third (Ogden 1994) as an unconscious third subjectivity cocreated by patient and analyst. This subjectivity is, like dreaming, predominantly a preverbal form of creating meaning, as opposed to a process focused on making use of the meanings created in the course of verbal symbolization.

Pathological forms of the analytic third (“the subjugating third”; Ogden 1996, p. 1123) are also experiences of creating meaning, though these experiences are self-destructive in the sense that the meaning being created is that of the destruction of meaning. For instance, in the case of a perverse intersubjectivity, the subject and object are engaged in destroying the experience of feeling psychically dead by means of the experience of feeling sexually excited in a way that feels utterly empty (Ogden 1996).

The Marvel of it

The transformation that occurs with the achievement of verbally symbolic language is, to my mind, nowhere better described than by Helen Keller (1903):

One day, while I was playing with my new doll, Miss Sullivan put my big rag doll into my lap also spelled “d-o-l-l” and tried to make me understand that “d-o-l-l” applied to both. [Miss Sullivan drew with her finger the shapes of the letters d-o-l-l on the palm of 7-year-old Helen’s hand.] Earlier in the day we had had a tussle over the words “m-u-g” and “w-a-t-e-r.” Miss Sullivan had tried to impress it upon me that “m-u-g” is mug and that “w-a-t-e-r” is water, but I persisted in confounding the two. In despair she had dropped the subject for the time, only to renew it at the first opportunity. I became impatient at her repeated attempts and, seizing the new doll, I dashed it upon the floor. I was keenly delighted when I felt the fragments of the broken doll at my feet. Neither sorrow nor regret followed my passionate outburst. I had not loved the doll. In the still, dark world in which I lived there was no strong sentiment or tenderness. (pp. 11–12)

Here, Keller describes her dashing the doll as a sign of her frustration concerning understanding what her teacher, Anne Sullivan, was trying to teach her. She was unable to feel a wide range of emotions, in particular, feelings of sorrow, regret, love, and tenderness. Helen was confined primarily to a preverbal world of signs in which the sign bore a direct relationship to the signified. Her throwing the doll to the floor (the sign) bore a direct correspondence with the signified (her feeling angry and frustrated).

When her teacher (thus far without a name for Helen) swept up the pieces of the broken doll,

I had a sense of satisfaction that my source of discomfort was removed. She brought me my hat and I knew we were going out into the warm sunshine. This thought, if a wordless sensation can be called a thought, made me hop and skip with pleasure. (Keller 1903, p. 12)

Here, Keller distinguishes between having a thought and having “a wordless sensation.”

Keller (1903) goes on to describe the change she experienced on achieving the capacity for verbally symbolic language which occurred upon recognizing the connection between the word water and water itself:

I left the well-house eager to learn. Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought. As we returned to the house every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life. That was because I saw everything with the strange, new sight that had come to me. On entering the door I remembered the doll I had broken. I felt my way to the hearth and picked up the pieces. I tried vainly to put them together. Then my eyes filled with tears; for I realized what I had done, and for the first time I felt repentance and sorrow. (p. 12)

Keller (1903) goes on to describe subsequent events of that day: “I learned a great many new words that day. I do not remember what they all were, but I do know that mother, father, sister, teacher were among them—words that were to make the world blossom for me” (p. 12).

With the acquisition of verbally symbolic language, there developed a new way of experiencing, a new way of coming into being, a new way of being alive. Emotions that she was not previously been able to feel—repentance and sorrow and love—Helen became able to experience. It is not that these feelings were latent and were waiting to be unearthed. This is emphatically not the case. These feelings were created for the first time when Keller (1903) entered the world of experience verbally symbolized. “Everything had a name, and each name gave birth to a new thought . . . every object which I touched seemed to quiver with life.” Names are not simply designations for feelings and things, they are ideas about feelings and people and things. Language gives rise to a qualitatively different realm of experience, a realm in which one is both subject and object, one is able to think of oneself thinking, one is alive to levels of meaning, a range of emotion, complexity of feeling, and forms of experiencing not previously attainable.

Concluding Comment

Preverbal language, which involves a direct relationship between sign and signified, is based in early development on binary opposites. This can be a powerful form of communication between mother and infant (“baby talk”) and analyst and patient “with the infinite variety of poetry.” Much in the mother-infant relationship and the analytic relationship can only be communicated in this symbolic form.

With the acquisition of verbally symbolic language, we are not simply understanding something more about our experience, we are creating a new form of experiencing, we are experiencing differently, and consequently coming into being in a different way. The I-me dialectic comes into being, self-reflection becomes possible. One becomes able to experience a far broader range and depth of emotion in relation to others who are experienced as whole and separate people. There is the joy of communicating in words with oneself and with others, which opens up a world that “quivers with life.”