When the Sun Bursts by Christopher Bollas

Author:Christopher Bollas
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300216233
Publisher: Yale University Press

When Larry walked around the room I realized that this represented a sort of choreography of inner speech. He was engaged in an inner conversation with himself. His oscillations seemed to be spatial enactments of the I talking to the me. For years, I would find myself pondering Larry’s enigmatic statements. Had he not shared his secret with me, I am quite sure that I would have failed to grasp the deep significance of the I-me relation that is common in a schizophrenic’s inner universe of thought.

Earlier, in Chapter 6, we met my patient Megan, who at first would speak in fragments that made no sense to me. It was some time before I realized that Megan was externalizing inner speech. She was not talking to me; she was unknowingly talking to herself in my presence. Much of what she said assumed an awareness of the connecting links between sentence fragments. Because she implicitly assumed her listener was in her mind, and had this awareness and heard her thoughts, she did not have to speak to me.

If the theories of inner experience explored by authors like Lev Vygotsky and Georges Bataille remain elusive, this is because these phenomena are virtually impossible to describe. Yet writers who address these issues assume we know what they are describing. And if we think about it, many of the core axioms of depth psychology—that we think unconsciously, for example—are similarly predicated on an assumption that we know this from our own inner experience. It would be impossible for anyone to provide scientific evidence of the series of mental events that constitute an emotional inner experience. The laboratory in which these writers work is the inner world—something we all have and know, even if we cannot communicate it.

Rather like Megan, we assume that when we are engaged in talking to ourselves we are having full discussions. In fact, this is an illusion. Although on occasion we may say something simple to ourselves—“Remember to go to the store after work”—our more complicated internal thoughts are not actually enunciated. Unconscious thought processes are extremely complex, occurring in simultaneities of overlapping and intersecting strands of meaning, subvocally articulated and elaborated. We take these inner discussions for granted, and they operate at the same sort of speed as our dreams.

This assumed knowledge is predicated on the existence of pronominal positions (you, me, I, we, they). Verbal grammatical construction is suspended in the lightning-fast process of unconscious thinking, but these positions, part of the assumed, constitute a psychic syntax crucial to unconscious processes of thought. It is assumed that we, as thinkers, are present in our mental productions, that we author them. However, we have very little conscious knowledge of what is taking place within the unconscious mind.

It seems that the palimpsest of thought moves forward under the aegis of a mental democracy consisting of speakers and listeners. Inner speech—the movement of assumed knowledge—must process thoughts deriving from many origins. In that moment-to-moment movement that constitutes unconscious thought, we do

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