organizing emotional data

"The key feature of Loewald's understanding of language is his challenge of that separation [between the verbal and non-verbal]" (7)."It is language that provides that life-enriching link between past and present, body and world, fantasy and reality, and language is deeply embedded in its original relational context" (10). "It may be that many intense emotional experiences, not just in infancy but in later life as well, are organized not only in terms of secondary process, in which internal and external, self and other are clearly deliniated, but also in terms of a primary process in which the participants are experienced as cocreating each other" (22)."The central ameliorative impact lies in relinking" (25).This piece was really evocative as it has been tying into my thinking about neurodiversity. I think some of the literature covered on the binary between verbal and non-verbal seems to be quietly ablist, assuming that folks who are stuck or lost in the non-verbal are inherently inferior and childish (I note also what this says about the general disempowerment of children). Locating personhood instead in the relation between these two operations--one of non-verbal impressions captured and the other of verbal translations--does interesting work of repeating the verbal process, which is a kind of ordering and sense-making that necessarily makes narrative cuts to the indistinguishable non-verbal atmospheric mass. Brains that are more easily distracted, or perhaps more open to the endless somatic reverberations, might then need to work harder to verbalize and to "order". These brains might even have different matter they must organize into a resistant order. Different instruments produce different readings.