Gendlin, Loewald, and Language
\I want to take a moment to explore the connection between two papers I have been playing around with in recent weeks. The first is Eugene Gendlin’s “Words can Say How they Work” and the second is the first Chapter in Stephen Mitchell’s Relationality: From Attachment to Intersubjectivity, which is entitled “Language and Reality” and discusses Mitchell’s reading and interpretation of the work of Hans Loewald.
Gendlin’s paper introduces us to one of the problems of language as he sees it. In this paper, Gendlin is primarily interested in the use of language and how language impacts the process of relating to and describing lived experience. He notes the conundrum presented in language, which is rooted in the reflexive nature of language itself. Words can never fully contain that which they intend to describe, because language is always contextual, shaped by things like situatedness, the body, history, experience, etc. However, we cannot only ever talk about things as though they exist beyond the parameters of possible description, because even in trying to do so we must talk in “forms and concepts”. Language’s primary function is to be, as best as it can, descriptive. And so, language is boxed into this paradox of always being able to signal towards something more and yet always already doing so from a place of extant and limited meaning. However, Gendlin tries to argue in this essay that this is in fact language’s “power”. That through the fact that it is always being what it already is and also something more, language obtains the power of being able to use itself to “[let] concepts work within and about the[ir] situatedness”.
Gendlin uses Heidegger’s sense of mood and understanding to approach this problem, which in this paper he combines to call “moody understanding”. In the most reducible sense, he is talking about something like how our affective and embodied responses, those experiences which oftentimes feel most beyond our capacity to fit into words, express some understanding about the nature of our present situation. Another word that might be used to describe what Gendlin is essentially talking about here is the “implicit”. In order for the implicit to function in the way that it does, words and language need to exist within a hermeneutic process where they both describe and fail to describe, in order for us to be able to do anything close to what it might mean to enter into and render the implicit explicit. (The examples Gendlin provides here are remembering the name of a recognized but also forgotten acquaintance or searching for the right word in the process of writing poetry. Most relevant to the space I am curating here, as I see it, is the thing we often try to do in therapy, which is to provide space for clients to try to articulate, or at least explore some new experience of, that which they implicitly already “know”.)
Gendlin goes on to say some interesting things about the body’s role in this process, though I think the question he poses at the end of the paper is the central one, which is “Can we reestablish the openness?” Gendlin is hopeful about the power of the implicit. He gets into this more in his last published longer form book on the topic, A Process Model. In the book, Gendlin lays a conceptual framework for understanding the idea that human experience is expansive and never to be confined. As he sees it, the implicit always implies and occurs into some other carrying forward. Before making some assertions about what this means for therapy, I want to bring in the Loewald-ness of it all.
Mitchell does an extraordinary job of inviting the reader into Loewald’s work and highlighting the richness and complexity of his thought. Loewald’s thinking, like Gendlin’s, is at least in part informed by the work of Martin Heidegger (having studied with him as a philosophy student before he pursued his medical degree). Though not necessarily a Heidegger scholar himself, Mitchell is keen to highlight the ways in which he perceives Heidegger as influencing Loewald’s theoretical concepts.
The major underpinning of the “Language and Reality” essay has to do with the way in which Loewald tries to bridge a divide, relevant to psychoanalytic thought, between primary and secondary language processes. Psychoanalysis has long been interested in language as a developmental phenomenon, with various theorist offering thoughts about what it means for the infant to be thrust into the world of symbols and representation that is language. Loewald challenges this split on a fundamental level, suggesting that language is always a relevant factor in life, and that the only true distinction has to do with perceptual qualities for the subject of what language is and how it operates, with the primary process being one of a “primal density” marked by affectivity and a kind of experiential predifferentiated “oneness” and secondary processes being more differentiated and symbolically determined. As Mitchell suggests towards the end of the “Language” section of his paper “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.” In other words, the belief is that language can be one of the mechanisms that allows the client to play in both spaces simultaneously, via the development of the capacity to use language within the affectively rich and experiential qualities of the “primal density”, as well as the more rational, higher order, cognitively grounded, and symbolically oriented qualities of secondary language processes.
These two essays, I think, point to ideas that, though not exactly the same, feel conceptually compatible. In either instance, they are making an argument for the idea that language in therapy should both 1.) not necessarily be reduced to rigid, literal meaning and 2.) acknowledge that in the process of experiencing language as extending through and beyond the literal and conceptual, it can be used to enliven and activate something that is both new and was always already there.
Gendlin and Loewald were both skeptical of a world that was too highly scientistic, technologized, and in which people are becoming more and more distant from and numb to the possibility of doing something which I will call here reaching beyond by reaching in. Psychotherapy is always, in some capacity, about helping the client to extend into some possibility they somehow already know is there, of which they may be said to have a “moody understanding”. That is, they show up because they already suspect things might somehow be able to be different or “better” than they already are. And what else might this moody understanding be than some kind of felt connection to the “primal density”, that foundational experiential unity in which everything is possible because nothing has yet been limited by the fact that is has been rendered actual, a space in which everything can be implied and all meaning is there as yet to be grasped.
Of course, how to help facilitate this is a matter of technique that is hard to articulate. The way I’ve come to understand it, is that it requires a lot of dutiful slowing down. That we might never recognize the possibility of seeing something new if we are always so busy skipping around between the meanings we have already found ourselves clinging desperately to, which have already been cultivated to help us divine some meaning and order out of the world we perceive ourselves as live in. Most importantly, this process requires the presence, and pacing, of a clinician who has been willing to already go into these spaces themselves and can bring that kind of reflection into the consulting room. Mitchell notes that Loewald seems in his own writing to suggest that we can help facilitate the client’s own capacity to access this space by making the therapy into something where it is in effect already happening, that is by moving into it with the client through that facet of therapy which always ought to be held as primary, the relationship.
This can be difficult, as the folks we work with have mostly been conditioned to this idea that they should be going to therapy to get answers, tips, or techniques, and may be frustrated by the idea that the therapist wants to do the opposite by inviting them into spaces of unknowing. I think it has at times confused, though also eventually delighted, a lot of the individuals whom I have had the privilege and opportunity to work with. If I’m being honest, it continues to confuse and delight me. I think that is partly the point. By inviting clients to join us in the hermeneutic openness that exists between experience and meaning, the implicit and the explicit, affect and cognition, body and mind, and to feel the ways in which these seeming opposites are already blended and contain the other, we are inviting them to dance in the confusion and delight that is playing with language. A “playing with” which implies we are both using language to facilitate play, but also playing with each other in the space disclosed by the possibilities of language. It’s a confounding and elusive orientation to try to obtain, but one which, when achieved, opens us to a spectrum of dynamic relational opportunities that is an essential component of accessing the very experiences of both being-in and being-with.
