32 Spirituality Studies 10-2 Fall 2024 through “holding, handling, and object presenting” (Winnicott 1971, 111), and the infant comes to respond with a smile. By the third month of life, a collaborative dance can be seen between parent and child, shown clearly through the work of Ed Tronick. When mothers in the lab collaborate with their infant and are told to stop responding, distress is communicated by the infant through expressions of concern, cries, and ultimately bodily contortions (Melinder et al. 2010, 472). In most cases, this sense of relationality comes to be expressed through verbal language – through words. Research has demonstrated the way the Self can be understood to some degree through these words. The Adult Attachment Interview has demonstrated that, through an understanding of linguistic patterns, one can understand with great accuracy the attachment behavioral system of an individual through the presence or lack of violations of collaborative discourse. Through the application of the linguistic philosophy of Paul Grice, unconscious internalized attachment behavioral systems can be identified. These can be perceived as early on as preschool, as secure versus insecure styles (Eskritt 2008, 435). These linguistic violations involve following or not the maxims of quality (be truthful), quantity (provide sufficient but not too much information), relation (be relevant), and manner (avoid ambiguity in communication) (Eskritt 2008, 436). Through coding of the Adult Attachment Interview, Mary Main and colleagues (Main 2000, 1081) tracked specific attachment patterns of an internalized Self in relation to others through violations of Grice’s rules of collaborative discourse: From the perspective of Grice’s maxims, we can now state that speakers who are able to maintain coherent, cooperative discourse while describing and evaluating their early attachment-related experiences tend to have secure infants. Moreover, violation of ‘particular’ maxims predicts particular categories of insecure attachment. Speakers who violate the maxims of ‘manner’, ‘relevance’, and ‘quantity’ tend to have resistant/ambivalent infants, while those who violate truthfulness or consistency (the maxim of ‘quality’) tend to have avoidant infants. A further consideration of the relationship between language development and the Self ultimately can be seen through the works of Jacque Lacan. In Lacanian theory, language comes to guide our perception of the world, and to potentially limit our experience. According to Lacan, language is used to distract us from the “real” (a materiality of existence beyond what can be expressed) in the development of the experience of a subjective, understandable, stable reality. For Lacan, the self is not innate or stable but constructed through language which is an attempt to create coherence from the chaos of the unconscious. Language thus provides an ongoing adaptation away from the real toward our experience of what we deem to be reality. Experiences of what is real can disrupt what we have created through our social version of reality, created through language. “Yet, the real is the rock against which all of our artificial linguistic and social structures necessarily fail. It is this tension between the real and our social laws, meanings, conventions, desires, etc., that determines our psychosexual lives. Not even our unconscious escapes the effects of language.” (Felluga 2011). The capacity for language can also be considered through the lens of Jewish spirituality, simultaneously contributing to creative capacities and potentially constraining the subjective experience. In the very first chapter of the Bible, Elohim (He. “God”) uses language to speak the world into being (Genesis 1). In the understanding of the medieval kabbalistic work The Zohar, creative speech was an expression of a longer, more subtle journey. It began when, “[t]wo thousand years before creating the world, the holy Blessed One [note: God] contemplated [note: the Hebrew letters] and played with them” (Zohar 1:2b). Before even the thought of creation begins, Ein Sof contains letters – symbols of the vibrational foundations of reality – as yet unmanifest, within itself. The journey from potential to actual existence then takes several stages, symbolized by thought, voice, and speech (Zohar 1:74a): When it arose in the will of the blessed Holy One to fashion glory for Its glory [note: to create the spiritual and physical realms], from the midst of thought a desire arose to expand – expanding from the site of concealed thought, unknown, expanding and settling in the larynx, a site continuously gushing in the mystery of the spirit of life. When thought expanded and settled in this site… It sought to expand and reveal Itself further… Jacob emerged, Consummate Man [note: symbolizing wholeness and harmony in the spiritual realm], a single voice issuing audibly. Hence, thought, having been concealed in silence, was heard revealing itself. Thought expanded further revealing itself, and this voice struck against lips. Then speech issued, consummating all, revealing all. It is perceived that all is concealed thought, having been within, all is one. In this vivid description of the Godhead, the most subtle manifestation known as keter, is associated with “divine thought or will”. The larynx is associated with binah, the
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTUwMDU5Ng==