Expressivity and Transformation through Language in Work with Serious Disorder

Abstract

ABSTRACT Amidst today’s growing interest in nonverbal modalities, I highlight the value of language with some seriously disordered patients, using excerpts from a case. Drawn upon theories in philosophy and psychoanalysis, language is viewed broadly as entailing semantic and phonetic aspects, yielding a range of expressivity serving concreteness, expulsiveness, and/or symbolic thought. I apply these theories to fragmented psyches and illustrate how language can reveal, and instantiate, disparate entities of self and object, including psychotic forms, that beset such minds, helping the analyst forge a cohering container. Citing Ogden, I also describe how talking itself can become an experiential mode of transformation, if the analyst finds the genre of talking that promotes dreaming and the patient’s own discovery of meaning.