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"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 w

"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...

Mitchell’s first chapter on “Language and Reality” highlights the ongoing importance of language in psychoanalytic theories. Mitchell examines prominent psychoanalytic theorists, particularly Loewald’s writing on language and psychoanalysis. “The centrality of language in the psychoanalytic experience makes possible a reanimation of psychic life through the excavation and revitalization of words in their original dense, sensory context in the early years of the patient's life” (12). This chapter emphasizes the dichotomy of development between preverbal and verbal childhood development.

“Perhaps the greatest mystery of modern astronomy is that the extraordinary centrifugal rush into differentiated structures and boundaries and spaces seems to be balanced by an opposite, centripetal force that keeps all those structures from flying apart, that brakes the force of the Big Bang, that connects the seemingly separate and autonomous elements of our universe, and that may eventually draw them all back together again into yet another cataclysmic rebirth.”“There is something else, “hidden matter” in the seeming vacancy of all that space, that generates enough gravity to tie togethe

I really enjoyed Mitchell's explanation and analysis of Loewald contrasted with Freud and Sullivan, whose views I did not particularly enjoy last week. The classical rhetoric of psychoanalysis, in Freudian terms, has always felt too divisive, rooted in the separation of parts of the Mind which cannot, by principle of their existence inside a single entity, be teased apart; similarly to most attempts to peel layers of 'culture' away from the 'individual'.