VOLUME 2. Novelty, Excitement, and Growth

Part 2. Reality, Human Nature, and Society

VII. Verbalizing and poetry

Among the evolutionary developments of mankind, speech is of especial importance and deserves a separate chapter. As with the other developments, the neurotic abuse consists in using a form of speech that is “instead of” rather than “along with” the underlying powers. This is the isolation of the verbal personality.

1: Social, Interpersonal, and Personal

People ordinarily notice their emotional conflicts with regard to ethical demands and responsibilities: they find confronted within themselves their “personal” wishes and their societal roles. The conflict, with its subsequent inhibition or guilt, is considered to be between the “individual” and “society.” The chapters following this one will be devoted to the structure of such incorporated alien standards: conforming and anti-social, aggression and self-conquest.

But as we have already pointed out, the differentiation of the individual in the organism/environment field is already a late development. Social relations, like dependency, communication, imitation, object-love, are original in any human field, long prior to one’s recognizing oneself as an idiosyncratic person or identifying the others as constituting society. Personality is a structure created out of such early interpersonal relationships; and in its formation there has usually already been the incorporation of an enormous amount of alien, unassimilated or even unassimilable material (and this, of course, makes the later conflicts between individual and society so much the more insoluble).

From one angle, it is useful to define “personality” as a structure of speech habits and consider it as a creative act of the second and third years; most thinking is subvocal speaking; basic beliefs are importantly habits of syntax and style; and almost all evaluation that does not spring directly from organic appetites is likely to be a set of rhetorical attitudes. To define in this way is not to belittle or explain away personality, for speech is itself a profound spontaneous activity. A child forming his personality by learning to speak is making a spectacular achievement, and from antiquity philosophers have felt that education is primarily learning humane speech and letters, c.g., “grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic” or “classics and scientific method.”

That is, we may think of the sequence (a) pre-verbal social relations of the organism, (b) the formation of a verbal personality in the organism/environment field, (c) the subsequent relations of this personality with the others. Clearly the right cultivation of speech is one that keeps this sequence flexibly open and creative throughout: habits that allow what is pre-verbal to flow freely and that can learn from the others and be altered.

But just as in our culture as a whole there has grown up a symbolic culture devoid of contact or affect, isolated from animal satisfaction and spontaneous social invention, so in each self, when the growth of the original interpersonal relations has been disturbed and the conflicts not fought through but pacified in a premature truce incorporating alien standards, there is formed a “verbalizing” personality, a speech that is insensitive, prosy, affectless, monotonous, stereotyped in content, inflexible in rhetorical attitude, mechanical in syntax, meaningless. This is the reaction to or identification with an accepted alien and unassimilated speech. And if we concentrate awareness on these “mere” habits of speech, we meet extraordinary evasions, making of alibis, and finally acute anxiety— much more than the protestations and apologies accompanying the revealing of important “moral” lapses. For to call attention to speech (or to clothes) is indeed a personal affront.

But the difficulty is that, disgusted with the customary empty symbolizing and verbalizing, recent philosophers of language set up astringent norms of speech that are even more stereotyped and affectless; and some psychotherapists give up in despair and try to by-pass speaking altogether, as if only inner silence and non-verbal behavior were potentially healthy. But the contrary of neurotic verbalizing is various and creative speech; it is neither scientific semantics nor silence; it is poetry.

2: Contactful Speech and Poetry

Speech is good contact when it draws energy from and makes a structure of the three grammatical persons, I, Thou, and It; the speaker, the one spoken to, and the matter spoken about; when there is a need—to communicate—something. As properties of the flow of speech these three persons are (1) the style and especially the rhythm, animation, and climax, expressing the organic need of the speaker; (2) the rhetorical attitude effective in the interpersonal situation (e.g., wooing, denouncing, teaching, bullying); (3) the content, or truth to the impersonal objects spoken about.

Again, especially as the contact of organism and environment becomes closer, the following powers interact:

(1) The sounding speech—the physical exercise of uttering and hearing.

(2) Thought—the filling out with content of various skeletal organizations.

(3) Subvocal speech—repeated unfinished verbal situations.

(4) Pro-personal social communication (e.g., outcries) and silent awareness (images, body-feeling, etc.).

In speech of good contact, these levels cohere in the present actuality. The thought is directed to efficient orientation and manipulation; the present situation is taken as an adequate possible field for solving an unfinished situation; the social animal is expressing itself; the physical exercise initiates the flow as a fore-pleasure and makes the whole an environmental reality.

Bearing in mind these psychological levels of speaking, thought, subvocal speech, and outcries and silent awareness, let us now consider poetry as a fine art as distinguished from ordinary contactful speech, and then contrast both of these with neurotic verbalizing.

A poem is a special case of good speech. In a poem, as with other good speech, the three persons, the content, the attitude and character, and the tone and rhythm, mutually express one another, and this makes the structural unity of the poem. For example, character is largely choice of vocabulary and syntax, but these rise and fall with the subject and are rhythmically distorted from the expected by feeling; or again, the rhythm gathers climactic urgency, the attitude becomes more direct, and the proposition is proved; and so forth. But the speaking activity of the poet is, as the philosophers say, “an end in itself”; that is, just by the behavior of the overt speech, just by handling the medium, he solves his problem. Unlike ordinary good speech, the activity is not instrumental in a further social situation, as to persuade the listener, to entertain him, to inform of something, in order to manipulate him for the solution of the problem.

Essentially, the poet’s is the special ease where the problem is to solve an “inner conflict” (as Freud said, the art-work replaces the symptom): the poet is concentrating on some unfinished subvocal speech and its subsequent thoughts; by freely playing with his present words he at last finishes an unfinished verbal scene, he in fact utters the complaint, the denunciation, the declaration of love, the self-reproach, that he should have uttered; now at last he freely draws on the underlying organic need and he finds the words. We must therefore notice accurately what the poet’s I, Thou, and It are in his present actuality. His Thou, his audience, is not some visible person nor the general public, but an “ideal audience”: that is, it is nothing but assuming the appropriate attitude and character (choosing a genre and diction) that let the unfinished speech flow with precision and force. His content is not a present truth of experience to be conveyed, but he finds in experience or memory or fancy a symbol that in fact excites him without his (or our) needing to know its latent content. His I is his style in its present use, it is not his biography.

At the same time as the overt words are forming, the poet can maintain the silent awareness of image, feeling, memory, etc., and also the pure attitudes of social communication, clarity and verbal responsibility. Thus instead of being verbal stereotypes, the words are plastically destroyed and combined toward a more vital figure. Poetry is therefore the exact contrary of neurotic verbalizing, for it is speech as an organic problem-solving activity, it is a form of concentration; whereas verbalizing is speech that attempts to dissipate energy in the speaking, suppressing the organic need and repeating, rather than concentrating on, an unfinished subvocal scene.

On the other hand, poetry is distinguished from ordinary contactful speech—e.g., good conversational prose—simply as one species of a class: a poem solves a problem that can be solved by verbal invention alone, whereas most speech occurs in situations where the solution requires also other kinds of behavior, the response of the listener, and so forth. It follows that in poetry—where the entire actuality must be carried by the speaking—the vitality of the speech is accentuated: it is more rhythmic, more precise, more feelingful, more imagistic, ere.; and most important of all, a poem has a beginning, a middle, and an end; it finishes the situation. Other contactful speech can be rougher and more approximate; it can rely on non-verbal means such as gesture; it need barely mention what is pressing for expression; and it breaks off into non-verbal behavior.

3: Verbalizing and Poetry

When divorced from its use as an instrument in a further social situation, or again from its own rules as a vital poetic activity, speech easily mirrors any and all experience. It is easy for a person to be deceived that he is feeling or even doing something if he speaks or “thinks” of feeling and doing it. So verbalizing easily serves as a substitute for life; it is a ready means by which an introjected alien personality, with its beliefs and attitudes, can live instead of oneself. (The only inconvenience is that the verbalized meal, encounter, etc., does not give nourishment, sexual pleasure, etc.) Thus, to revert to a previous discussion, most apparent reminiscing and planning is not really memory or anticipation at all, which are forms of the imagination, but it is something that one’s concept of oneself is telling to oneself; and most indignation and judgment have little to do with felt anger or rational measure but are an exercise of mama’s and papa’s voices.

It is not that the verbalizer talks, but how he talks. With regard to the three grammatical persons, I, Thou, and It, he manifests a rigidity, fixation, or stereotype that abstracts only a meager part of the possibilities of the actual situation, enough to maintain a social face and avoid the anxiety and embarrassment of silence, revelation, or self-assertion; and also enough to exhaust the speech-energy so that one does not hear the unfinished subvocal scenes that might otherwise become clamorous. That is, instead of being a means of communication or expression, verbalizing protects one’s isolation from both the environment and the organism.

The lack of contact with the I is often spectacularly observable in the division of the body into a sounding mouth with rigid rapid lips and tongue and an unresonant vocalism, with all the rest of the body kept at bay uninvolved; or sometimes the eyes and a few gestures from the wrists or the elbows join the verbalizing mouth; or sometimes one eye, while the other is glassy, wandering, or disapproving the chatter; or the face is divided into two halves. The words come in bursts irrelevant to the breathing, and the tone is monotonous. In poetic speech, on the other hand, the rhythm is given by pulses of breathing (verses), by the gaits of locomotion and dance (meters), by syllogism, antithesis, or other beats of thought (stanzas and paragraphs), and by the orgiastic intensification of feeling (climax), then diminishing into silence. Variety of tone and richness of overtone are the potentiality of ringing in the primitive outcries as occasion arises. The verbalizer rarely hears his own voice, when he listens to it he is surprised; but the poet attends to the subvocal murmurs and whispers, he makes them audible, criticizes the sound and goes back over it. (There is an in-between character, a kind of interpretative actor without a poet, who notices nothing but the sound of his voice, modulates the tone and tastes the words; presumably he is getting a real oral satisfaction out of it, holding the center of the floor while the audience steals away.)

The rhetorical attitude, the Thou, of the verbalizer is irrelevant to the actual social scene, but the tone that sounds shows that he is fixedly acting out some unfinished subvocal situation. No matter what the occasion, the voice is complaining or reproaching or condemning, or contrariwise wrangling or making an alibi or vindicating itself. In the repetition of this scene—perhaps alternately playing both roles—the rest of the organism is rigidly immobilized. The poet, we have said, capitalizes on the subvocal situation: concentrating on it, he finds the right audience, the ideal audience of literature; he plastically molds the language to express the relevant organic need and come to an insight, a solution. The subvocal alien is thus assimilated again to his own personality. It is often asserted that the art-work does not solve any problem or solves it only temporarily, because the artist does not know the latent content of his symbol; and if this were so, poetry would again be an obsessive exhaustion of energy in a repeating situation, like verbalizing. This is both true and false: the problem that the artist does not solve is the one that makes him only an artist, free only in the vital activity of speaking but unable to use the words also instrumentally in further free acts; and many poets feel the obsessiveness of their art in this respect—finishing a work they are exhausted, and still have not regained a lost paradise. (It is not to be seen, by the way, that many other activities—even psychotherapy—win us that lost paradise.) But as for the particular subvocal problems, they are really solved, one by one; the proof is that the successive art-works are fundamentally different, there is a deepening of the art-problem; and indeed, this activity sometimes proceeds so far that the poet is finally forced to confront life-problems that he cannot solve by artistic means alone.

In the content, the It, of his speech, the verbalizer is in a dilemma: he must stick to the facts of actuality in order nor to seem demented or be ridiculous, yet they are not his real concern nor can he allow himself to notice them too closely, with sense and feeling, for then they would, since any reality is dynamic, disrupt his truce, destroy his projections and rationalizations, and arouse anxiety; the actual life would invade the substitute life. The verbalizer bores because he means to bore, to be let alone. The compromise is to speak in stereotypes, vague abstractions or superficial particularity, or other ways of saying the truth and not saying anything at all. (Meantime, of course, the content is energized by projections of his unfelt needs.) The poet again makes just the contrary choice of content: the actual truth is freely distorted and made a symbol for the underlying concern; he does nor hesitate to lie or be irrational; and he richly develops the symbols with a lively use of his senses, keenly noticing sights, scents, and sounds, and empathizing with, projecting himself into, emotional situations, rather than alienating his own feelings and projecting them.

Finally, the verbalizer is embarrassed by the activity of speaking itself. He uses meaningless expressions to gain assurance, “Don’t you think?” “You know,” “In my opinion,” or he fills out the silence with grunts; he is self-conscious of the syntax; and he hedges his speech with a literary frame before he ventures his own remarks, such as they are, like “It may be far-fetched, but it seems to me that. . .” But for the poet the handling of the words is the activity itself; the form, e.g., the sonnet, is not a frame but integral to the plot; he is responsible to the function of syntax but free with the forms; and as he progresses in the art, his vocabulary becomes more and more his own—more idiosyncratic if his subvocal problems are obscure and hard for him to catch, more classical if they are the problems he recognizes in others.

4: Critique of Free-Association as a Technique of Therapy

Let us now consider a special case of verbalizing: the experiment of free-association as practiced by orthodox psychoanalysis. What we want to call attention to is the difference between the patient’s behavior in this technique and the therapist’s; and from this critique we shall again come to conclusions about the nature of good speech similar to those we have been advancing.

In free-association the patient is given some content A to begin with, usually the detail of a dream he has had; he associates to it another word B—whatever comes to his tongue—and to this another word C, and so on. He “freely” associates, that is he does not try to organize the series to make sense or whole-meanings, or to solve a problem. Also he must not censor (decline to make the association because of his criticism of the words as they flow). Such a behavior can be called the limiting or ideal case of verbalizing.

According to the older association-theory, the sequence of words would follow the law: If A has frequently occurred with B, or has a similarity to it, or at furthest a similarity to what has frequently occurred, then there is a tendency for it to call up B, and so likewise B calls up C, and so on. The whole chain would be analyzed and “explained"’ piecemeal in this way. It was the genius of psychoanalysis to show that the free-associations did not in fact follow merely by this law of piecemeal association; rather they had a tendency to organize themselves in meaningful wholes or clusters, and to proceed in a certain direction, and that these clusters and directions had an important meaningful relation to the original stimulus, the dream detail, and to the underlying problem of the patient. The patient was not in fact “mechanically” producing the stream but was, though unaware of it, expressing certain tendencies, circling back to certain emotional needs, and trying to fill out an unfinished figure. This was, of course, a capital proof of the existence of the unconscious; the question is whether it is useful for psychotherapy.

Note that the therapist is concentrating on the stream and creating whole figures in it (finding and making them): he attends to the clusters, times the associations that lag and indicate resistance notices the tone and facial expression. In this way he becomes aware of something about the patient, namely the patient’s behavior in unawareness.

But the goal of psychotherapy is not for the therapist to become aware of something about the patient, but for the patient to become aware of himself. Therefore there must then begin the process by which the therapist explains to the patient what he (the T) now knows about him (the P). In this way the patient acquires much interesting knowledge about himself, there is no doubt of it; but it is a question whether or not he thereby increases his awareness of himself. For the knowledge-about has a certain abstractness, it is not concernful; and it occurs again in his customary context of introjecting the wisdom of an authority. If he could conic to recognize the object of knowledge as himself, then this kind of knowledge—that one knew and did not know one knew—would be close and terribly concernful. The goal of therapy is to make him recognize this, but this is just where we started in the first place.

The problem is that in the activity that he was engaged in, he had been verbalizing a stream of meaningless words. That activity did not especially add to his experience at all—on the contrary, it was a fair facsimile of a usual experience: he knows himself in that role. The rule Do Not Censor, relieved him from responsibility for the words—also not an unusual attitude for many people. But the knowledge that is now explained to him is quite alien to that activity; it belongs to quite a different usual activity: namely taking the unpleasant truth and swallowing it whole; and again the old man is saying terrible things about him. (But perhaps it is a nicer man, so he may think, as Wilhelm Stekel used to say, “I’ll get well just to please the old fool.” This is a method of cure, but it is not as such free-association.)

The danger of the technique would be that, bracketing off the self that is responsible, feels concern, and makes decisions, the patient might relate his new knowledge strictly to his verbalizing, pleasantly tinged with the euphoria of a warm atmosphere and a friendly paternal audience. Then, instead of healing the split, the technique would confuse it further.

5: Free-Association as an Experiment in Language

But let us consider the useful and beautiful aspects of free-association: taking it for what it is in itself, as a mode of language.

To begin with, the associations circle round a dream detail. Let us assume that the patient accepts the dream as his own, remembers and can say that he dreamt it rather than that a dream came to him. If now he can connect new words and thoughts with that act, there is a great enrichment of language. The dream speaks in the image-language of childhood; the advantage is not to recollect the infantile content, but to learn again something of the feeling and attitude of child speech, to recapture the mood of eidetic vision. and connect the verbal and pre-verbal. But from this point of view, the best exercise would perhaps be not free-association from the image and application of cold knowledge to the image, but just the contrary: careful literary and pictorial representation of it (surrealism).

Yet something can be said for the free-associating itself. It is salutary for a patient who is too scrupulous and prosy in his speech to babble and find the heavens do not fall. This is the playful matrix of poetry: to let the speech apparently develop itself, from image to thought to rhyme to exclamation to image to rhyme, however it comes, but at the same time to feel that it is oneself who is speaking, it is not automatic speech. But here again the best exercise would perhaps be a more direct one: to concentrate on the speech act while free-associating or uttering nonsense syllables or snatches of song.

There is a more essential virtue in free-association, closer to the use classically made of it in psychoanalysis. The reason the patient is asked to free-associate rather than to tell his story and answer questions is, of course, that his habitual discourse is neurotically rigid, it is a false integration of his experience. The figure he is aware of is confused, dark, and uninteresting because the background contains other repressed figures of which he is unaware but that distract his attention, absorb energy, and prevent creative development. The free-association disrupts this frozen relation of figure and ground, and allows other things to become foreground. The therapist notes them down, but what is the advantage to the patient? It is not, we have seen, that the new figures can be made to cohere with his habitual figure of his experience, for the attitude of free-associating is dissociated from that experience. But it is this: he learns that something, not known as his, comes from his darkness and yet is meaningful; thereby perhaps he is encouraged to explore, to regard his unawareness as terra incognita but not chaos. From this point of view, he must of course be made a partner in the interpreting. The thought here is that the maxim, Know Thyself, is a humane ethics: it is not something done to one in trouble, but something one does for oneself as a human. The therapist’s arcane attitude toward the interpretation, withholding it or doling it out at the right moment, is contrary to this. It does not follow for the analyst to reveal all his interpretations; rather, to interpret very little, but to give the patient the tools of the analyst. It should be obvious that the appalling incuriosity of people is an epidemic and neurotic symptom. Socrates knew that this was due to fear of self-knowledge (Freud emphasized the particular fear of the sexual knowledge kept from children). Then it is unwise to conduct a course of healing in a context that confirms the split: the therapist, the grown-up, knows everything; and oneself can never know the secret unless told. But it is the possession of tools that overcomes the sense of being excluded.

Finally, let us contrast the three modes of speech used in the free-association experiment: the patient free-associating, the therapist learning something and telling it to himself, and the therapist explaining what he knows to the patient. Here we have three different sets of words relating to an existing case. To the patient, his associations are the equivalent of nonsense-syllables: they are pure verbalizing. From these words, however, the therapist becomes aware of the patient, and this awareness, formulated in sentences that he tells to himself, state an existing case, they are truth. Yet in this context, the same sentences, told to the patent, are no longer true-neither true to the patient nor now to the therapist: they are not true because they do not work, they have no value as proof, they are mere abstractions. To a logician this factor, of the therapist’s concern or the patient’s unconcern, of accepting the propositions into one’s reality or not accepting them, might seem irrelevant; he would say it is a merely “psychological” question, therapeutically momentous but logically insignificant, whether or not the patient grasps the truth of the interpretation, or on what level he grasps it. But we should rather put it as follows: the “existing case” here is as yet potential, it is an abstraction; and whether there is one actuality or quite a different actuality to have a “truth” of, depends on the words of the formulation, the concern, and the attitude with which it is learned.

To a logician trained in physics, the “right” use of words, the speech char is most meaningful about “reality,” has a meager vocabulary of thing-symbols, an analytic syntax expressing the complex by additions, and an absence of passional tone; and he would reform language in this direction (e.g., toward Basic English). But to a psychologist concerned with the affect-lessness of our times, right speech has just the opposite traits: it is full of the passional tones of childhood speech, its words are complex functional structures like the words of primitives, and its syntax is poetry.

6: Philosophies of Language-Reform

Given the modern epidemics of symbolic social institutions instead of communities, and verbalizing instead of experience, there have been numerous attempts to reform language, by rhetorical analysis and logical analysis. The underlying rhetorical motives of the speaker are brought to light; and by empirical criticism, empty stereotypes and abstractions are measured and deflated against the standard of concrete things and behavior. For our purposes we may summarize these philosophies of good language as “empirical,” “operational,” and “instrumental.”

Empirical language reduces the good use of words to signs for either percepts or observable phenomena or easily manipulable objects and simple behaviors. (The highest degree of concreteness is generally assigned to inanimate “physical” objects, but this is a metaphysical prejudice; Auguste Comte, for instance, considered social relations and institutions to give the most concrete protocols.) The thing-words are then synthesized by a simple logic of combination.

Operational languages lay the primary emphasis on the manipulation-of-the-things, rather than the things themselves. This provides at least a sensory-motor unity as basic.

Instrumental languages require that the basic unities include also the ends-in-view, therefore the motives and rhetorical attitudes of the speech.

There is thus a series more and more inclusive of the factors of contact; yet no such analytic language can reach contactful speech itself, for contactful speech is partly creative of the actuality, and the creative use of words plastically destroys and remolds the words: no list of basic words can be given only from the things, the non-verbal behavior, or the ends-in-view. Contact involves orientation, manipulation, and feeling—and feeling is verbally given especially in rhythm, tone, and the choice and distortion of the words and syntax. The norms and protocols of good speech cannot be analyzed to simple concrete things and drives—these are not concrete enough; they are given in concrete and often very complicated whole-structures. To put it bluntly, linguistic reform—the cure of empty symbols and verbalizing—is possible only by learning the structure of poetry and humane letters, and finally by making poetry and making the common speech poetic.

The matter has a philosophical importance far beyond linguistic reform. There is a continual search, precisely among empiricists and instrumentalists, for a “naturalistic ethics,” one that will involve no norms outside the on-going processes. But if the criteria of correct language are so chosen that the feelingful and creative aspects of speech do not lend to the “meaning,” are “merely subjective,” then no such ethics is possible in principle, for no evaluation invites assent on logical grounds. On the other hand, if it is once understood—as should be obvious—that feelings are not isolated impulses but structured evidence of reality, namely of the interaction of the organism/environment field, for which there is no other direct evidence except feeling; and further, that a complicated creative achieving is even stronger evidence of reality; then the rules of the language can be made so that every contactful speech is meaningful, and then evaluation can be logically grounded.