The Pre-Verbal, the Verbal, the Nonverbal, the Sign

"Most philosophers and psychologists of language regard early human development as bifurcated by a fundamental and perhaps unbridgeable divide between the preverbal and the verbal... Following Wittgenstein and Ryle, thinking is often discussed as interiorized speech; following Lacan, many understand the unconscious itself in terms of linguistic structures... (Cavell, 1993, following Wittgenstein, calls it the "veil of language") between the verbal and the verbal" (5-6)"For Loweald, language transcends the distinction between preverbal and verbal; language begins to play an important role in the earliest days of life. The most important distinction is not between preverbal and verbal, or between primary and secondary process, but between the ways in which language operates in these two developmental eras and levels of mental organization" (7-8)"Does language in its adaptive, everyday (secondary-process) form resonate with its earlier sensory, affective, unidifferentiated (primary-process) origin, or has a severing split the two realms from each other?" (9)"Rather than finding new words to convey new insights, Loewald nestles his innovations carefully within the old words, giving birth to new meanings while attempting to preserve resonances with a deep past" (14)This reminds me of "finding a new vocabulary" projects -- projects that seek to change terms in order to recreate their objects/fields of study. However, these recreations ultimately return to the same, older terms they are trying to escape. For instance: "culture" and "world."""But it is the separation into outer and inner reality," Loewald points out, "that makes for the possibility of 'reality' and 'illusion.' Prior to sorting out inner and outer reality there is no 'room' for an intermediate third area, no space in which to distinguish or oppose illusion and reality" (p. 71)" (20)I am fixated on "the sign" -- is there a way to do semiotics without accepting its decoding/"key + lock" approach to reading? What needs to be unsettled in semiotics in order to open it?""repetition compulsion" to describe the forms through which early traumatic experiences emerge again and again throughout life, often with the roles reversed so that the abused become the abusers" (22)There are so many "repetition compulsions" in pedagogy. I'm thinking about how "Proseminar" is treated as a necessary rite of passage, or trauma, in our department. We learn "the canon" because they had to learn "the canon" and so on.""Reality testing," Loewald (1974a) states, "It may be understood more comprehensively as the experiential testing of fantasy - its potential and suitability for actualization - and the testing of actuality - its potential for encompassing it in, and penetrating it with, one's fantasy life. We deal with the task of a reciprocal transposition [p. 368]"" (28-29)"But separating fantasy and reality is only one way to construct and organize experience. For life to be meaningful, vital, and robust, fantasy and reality cannot be too divorced from each other. Fantasy cut adrift from reality becomes irrelevant and threatening. Reality cut adrift from fantasy becomes vapid and empty. Meaning in human experience is generated in the mutual, dialectically enriching tension between fantasy and reality; each requires the other to come alive" (29)"For Loewald, only the enchanted life is a life worth living" (29)