Minding the Gap: Language Games and Early Trauma in Analytic Process

Gaming a System

I hope in this article to describe how the heart and “guts” of our analytic or therapeutic processes cannot be captured in words, with the exactness we sometimes want or need, during fraught moments of impasse for instance, when at a loss for words as the patient keenly looks to us for help. Such moments can leave us in verbal cul-de-sacs, like Moebius flytraps. I find Ludwig Wittgenstein’s idea of language games can assist us here.

This is Wittgenstein’s metaphor for the variety of ways we employ language and put our words into play, occurring within a layered contextuality of tradition, habit, biases, and so on. Our games are as varied as poker, tennis, or television’s “Survivor”, in the vast complexity of inside jokes, internet memes, analytic theory, the sociopolitical, pop culture, and so on. Language is the ocean in which we swim; no one stands outside or above it with the perspective we at times desire. 

Wittgenstein called such worlds our inherited backgrounds, those oceans “baptizing” us at birth, developmentally adapted and blended along the way. In my case, intersubjective-systems theory has been a refreshing swim, expansive and relatively free of the toxic pollution I grew up with (to really stretch this metaphor.) When such waters become clinically clouded, I find myself disoriented from the language games of my adopted analytic home.

The essence of a given language game is best shown rather than said, as “essences” are elusive, as with those who love golf versus those who, like Mark Twain, view it as “a good walk spoiled.” Wittgenstein says there is nothing to “get,” in terms of mere description. One learns to play, cottons to the game, or moves on.

I often wonder how to explain relational language games to new patients, my words like the lyrics of a song in a genre unfamiliar. (Wittgenstein notes that the “rules” of any given language game are contextually embedded, that to describe a rule is not to describe a game.) Most patients are new to phenomenology and terms like “intersubjective,” or the significance of “subjectivity” itself. I often take such words for granted—tempting the verbal essentializing of a process that seeks to avoid exactly that. It is a trap we all fall into from time to time.

“To describe a language is to describe a way of life,” as Wittgenstein said. We are doing nothing less than helping patients find new ways to perceive and organize their most intimate experiences of self and other, i.e., to live.

Our priority is accessing the patient’s subjectivity, their “inside” experience. But some were so rigidly conditioned to see life from outside, via an inarguable “objective” viewpoint, that there appears hardly an “inside” or “you” to speak of, a pronoun devalued in early life.

Such a dis-integrated, alienating viewpoint is rigidly enforced in traumatogenic surrounds, derailing the child’s discovering their own way with words. Language becomes essentialized, words good or bad, depending on rigid family rules or “objective” truisms.

Such are the backgrounds patients survive, as the impact of rigid or chaotic anguish was never validated, a suffocating collapse of foreground and background, leading to epistemological trauma or “gaslighting.” Such patients often say of emotional injury, Is this really hurtful or all in my head? Spoken affectivity remains toxic, and clinically inert.

Wittgenstein famously said, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world,” and the rub is that we are all limited in our “I”-ness. How do we demonstrate or “explain” to patients the significance or value of the distinctiveness of our “you,” the patient’s  “me,” ever threatening to loved ones? (Buber wept.)

My own language world can land patients in a pickle, since I am curious about them, conversing in what may sound like Klingon; so many have never been at home in their own mother tongue. Therefore a gap, both of us speaking English yet nowhere near the same page.

It can be hard to discern how to meet patients “where they’re at,” in absorbing their perspective without sacrificing too much of our own. The gap can be chasm-like. I recall for instance a new patient who said in all sincerity, “well my wife says I need this… can you ask her what my issues are?” I said, “hm, what do you think?”; he responded, “I think she thinks I have issues”; and around we went. It took him a year to be able to name, reluctantly, any “inside” vulnerability or uncertainty of his own, in needing help to identify feelings; he remained in treatment because it assuaged his wife.

I discovered his profound need to accommodate a narcissistic father—a formulation without significance, since “my folks did what they could, it’s stupid to live looking backward,” and that was that. I said, “perhaps time is a circle, the past is present”; he said “yes, and we live in the present, as Buddhism says,” and there we went into the Moebius curve.

Some patients, this one included, never experienced much empathic understanding to speak of, as any dwelling in his own subjectivity was concretely “selfish.” (His father praised his selflessness, an inarguable life principle.) I tried to persuade this patient he could not persuade his wife to stop “being negative,” contra the embedded language games of his youth. Here I lost sight of why I was so pulled into his language of logic and rationality, meeting him where he was “at” in trying (a bit too hard) to translate what cannot really be translated, i.e., emotional experience and its valuation.  In fact we shared a hidden background of paternal trauma, protected via the intellectualizing of emotion; this took time to discover, after it had been blinking in neon since the first session.

The background context and assumptions of any language game cannot fully be kept in mind, as “sooner or later justifications come to an end.” Thus the fallibility of language, signified slipping from its signifier in the fraught ambience, the flow and pressure of living; we overlook how words tempt familiarity as their contextual world fades from view.

Take “Intersubjectivity,” a complex term rooted in phenomenology, with an indeterminate sense of who is contributing what, from whose point of view—like an optical illusion in which we see a vase and two faces (like Wittgenstein’s duck and rabbit example). What is it that enables us “in our minds” to see one aspect versus another, or both? The question is unanswerable, just as we often say “consciousness” or “thought,” impossible to define on their own, though we understand them in everyday use.

Wittgenstein illuminates such embedded use of words in discussing pain and a child’s “ouch.” It is the context lending heft to the expression, via systemic responsiveness—not (as we might be tempted to see it) the caregiver’s interpreting a child’s “inner pain.” The tender responsiveness and the word associated with it (“ouch”) organize the sensation into a language game, a context. What if caregivers fail to respond, or do so with intrusion or rage? The word diminishes or fades, in the child’s spoken world.

Self-valuation or esteem also dwindles, and concretization begins. Feelings or sensations remain “inner,” quarantined into insignificance or somatization.

Some patients tell me their depression is burdensome for others, implicitly including the analyst. It is as if the expression of pain itself, that “ouch,” takes on a dark magic, needing dispelling or exile, slipping from its relational origins into a monolithic signifier.

I refer here to Wittgenstein’s caution against “the bewitchment of language by means of our intelligence.” Here familiar words or phrases take on a self-contained or a priori truth, loosened from their context.

I find that a patient’s unshakable belief in their own toxicity is a kind of dark bewitchment, as with an archaic inheritance wherein “ouch” is certain to be useless or harmful, reactively blurring into what Ogden called an imperative for action.

It occurs with theoretical language as well. For instance we often talk of “empathy,” a notion suddenly airless when patients seek only antidote or surefire behavioral activity; here I might want to match certainty with certainty; not so fast, pardner, this here’s emotional!…as if words like “emotion” and “understanding” carry inherent value, conveyed (I hope) through my “proper” empathic delivery, as when I earnestly but uselessly describe the importance of grief. (We cannot always avoid this.)

At such times I might fancy myself the caregiver patients never had, an anti-father of sorts—opposite to mine perhaps, who used words like bullets for self-protection, including a sister who died from overdose. I learned to talk like an adult at an early age, afraid to speak like a child as a child; now hoping to avoid this with patients, offering balm rather than bullets, via a warmly liberating delivery.

It is easy to overlook Wittgenstein’s notion that, though we are tempted to think we are filling in a picture, what we are doing is tracing around the frame. It is a framing perspective, in other words, lending dimension to speech, the gradual co-adoption of which helps patients find a new view of self-experience—to see eventually that “subjectivity” speaks a world.

Are We Here Yet?

Some patients’ frames are so narrow and constricting that all they see is a vase or two faces (self or other, never and), even when we suggest both, stumbling in explaining the latter. Such a gap emerges in every treatment, tempting bewitchment, me slipping from my perch, into a familiar yet unseen fallibility.

Kate was a bright young thirty’ish graduate student, completing her graduate social work degree. She interned at a local free clinic, and worried that she was not up to the job, fearing she would freeze in front of her clients and with her esteemed supervisor.

Kate’s mother had angrily divorced her father when Kate was very young, leaving her in the care of a surly, volatile father, a science teacher who did not play well with others; he drank heavily, spitting contempt toward any hint of Kate’s vulnerability. “Use your brain,” he tersely repeated, impossible to please, burdening a young girl who needed to please to survive. (Kate’s more personable mother appeared but erratically.)

Kate viewed her mind mechanically, like a machine, per the scientizing language of her father, a way of holding on to the hope she might talk her way into his approval, finally. Her intellect was formidable, as she presented evidence that her yearnings (or “neediness”) were like bugs in a software program. Such metaphors appeared reified and strangely bewitching.

Her hope was that her mind could be “rewired,” while I saw her needs and fears as an abandoned selfhood shouting for attunement. As with many tyrannized and neglected patients, she pined for a shoring up of the very self-reliance that led to such chasmic isolation. I felt pressured to fill the gap, explaining the method to my phenomenological madness, which her supervisor recommended. “That Stolorow stuff sounds good,” she said at first.

I found her earnest, sincere, and highly guarded, albeit with glimmers of forgiveness—for others almost exclusively.

Yet she appeared indifferent to her own affective hunger, ever problematic. Her boyfriend Andy’s pot use bothered her. She offered him rational reasons for stopping (it damaged brain functioning), worried he was self-destructing, afraid for his health—the source of her terror meanwhile, namely her terror of repeated abandonment, remained camouflaged by the conceptual.   

She was terrified her so-called “neediness” would sabotage the relationship (as she imagined she was to blame for her father’s antagonism.) She was hungry to feel “full,” via some concept of attunement; but such need was concretized, via the “I” of her father’s solidified “you.” (He also made sexual wisecracks about Kate’s mother, claiming her “neediness” ruined the marriage.)

Andy’s sarcastic responses to Kate triggered her, prompting her to “go offline” and binge on sweets, followed by searing shame and self-hatred. Any spoken vulnerability remained verboten in the system, ruled by a riot of strictly “internal” (unnamed) chaos and agitation. Any soothing here was literal, via conceptualization or carbs—her mouth a portal bereft of any spoken desire. Such desire, with me, became a need to dump her radioactive affectivity.

Kate’s worldhood was seen always from outside, the only possible framing. When I mentioned trauma-affect, Kate interpreted it as a bug of misperception, as Andy’s behavior “wasn’t so bad” and “I’m just seeing it as traumatic. It isn’t.” My attempt at transference-work was a non-starter, a complex game of past and present: two faces again, while for Kate the problem was only “me.” She lived in a numbingly infinitized present, quarantining emotionality under an (unseen) archaic command.

She became anxious when I tried to go beneath or behind her words, as if they spoke for themselves. I felt a bit exasperated at times, us sounding like two academics in parsing the difference between brain and mind, the latter a figure of speech for Kate, a brain inarguably real.

She meanwhile desired a near-total independence to become more freely relational, ridding herself of problematic affect in “unburdening“ Andy, a monadic self-ideal of strength and performative value. Otherwise, when he made cracks about her weight, “my amygdala and parasympathetic system hijack me, and I’m not there.” Her lack of curiosity in her own feeling-states stumped me, as if she were surrendering to the Matrix. Past memories were also blurry, her spending day after dissociative day with snacks and the TV. I said perhaps those snacks were soothing, she wondered if hypnosis would “fix that.”

Her anxiety at home escalated, as Andy threatened to leave if she didn’t stop the lectures; she couldn’t help herself, nor could I. Why can’t I get through, we both wondered. She was desperate for suggestions or detouring “tools” to avoid anxiety, stay “online,” to find a way to “better” convey her concern for Andy’s self-sabotage.  

The ensuing stalemate prompted me one day to linger on her statement, “I’m not there.” Instead of speculating about the absence of feeling, I tried to imagine the context in which such a statement ordinarily occurred. I dwelled on other ways to hear those words, what background I might be missing.

What if she needed not to be there, if it were too overwhelming — a means of survival, not mere aversion? Maybe I had misassumed she “deep down” knew how to play such emotional games, because of her degree. But what if her going offline was a trauma-state of absence: a black hole of affect, and corresponding selfhood? Perhaps I could explore her anxiety about not knowing how to “fix” what could not even be named.

What if I simply took her at her word—looked at what we did say, not just formulate what was absent, and why?  She was relatively new to psychotherapy, with zero exposure to phenomenological process. Her intellectualized means of seeing and speaking were the only form of life she could rely upon. It helped her survive. Here I was asking her implicitly to disarm and jump ship, play a game she had never been taught or shown.

To this clinician, “fallibility” has come to speak of forgiveness, and Wittgenstein shows us the complications and imperfections of our language games. To speak to a newer patient of “organizing principles,” and the meanings of one’s emotionality, is sophisticated indeed. But that does not mean that no organization exists; it often hides in plain sight, like a painting we pass in the hallway and after a time fail to notice.

We may think we have a (formulated) picture firmly in mind, no need for a closer look, lest we too notice something disquieting. In this case my anxiety, and talking past it, obscured a dread of finding two faces, for Kate’s father sounded remarkably similar to mine.

Tied to this was my assuming she “deep down” knew what I was asking, if only I could somehow lay out the rules of the game with empathic clarity, reversing a disinterest which may in fact have been a mutually overlooked anxiety.  Her apparent disinterest provoked an archaic fear of mine, of appearing inadequate to the task, wavering in uncertainty, tempting the other’s dismissal…as with my own father, who demanded I set aside my “childish” self-expression to follow his intellectualized script, often word for word, the child swallowed in a spoken adulthood.

In this way, my adopted analytic “family” seemed threatened, reification bewitching us both, me hoping (in the face of her suffering) to dispel the grip of her father’s mechanizations.  But such arid perspective was normative for her, provoking my angst of disappearing (again) into the shadows of reification.

We had in other words a conjunction of camouflaged bewitchment, as if words alone (so warmly articulated!) carried benevolence or danger.  My trying to “get the words right,” lost in formulation, was my going offline, as an aspect of my analytic self disappeared with Kate as she once disappeared with her dad and now with Andy (who disappeared into pot), as with me and my father, who disappeared into a gin bottle.   

I intuited such disappearance was lonely for her, as I felt lonely in her presence, filling such silence with words, obscuring a framing hiding in plain sight.

I then wondered aloud one session if Kate had ever been encouraged or even allowed to be there, in the way she wanted? Did anyone even notice she was gone? By this I implied, hopefully, my own wish to find the “you” that had never been sought.

In fact I came to believe she did not “go offline” but was rather annihilated, wiped clean off the motherboard. Trauma crashes the system, I said to her: a shove off a cliff into nowhere. One would almost need to stay offline, amidst such wordless terror (or other stubbornly unformulated affect.)

Kate looked disoriented, taking it in, and then her eyes watered. “Why am I crying?” she said, swiping a tear. “I guess no one’s ever put it like that before.”

Me: “Maybe you’ve seen saying it all along.”

Some aspect of Kate came subtly to life, as if she were seeing…possibility. It occurred to me the primal pleasure of eating was a way of feeling alive (and “online”), after being left for dead. I wondered aloud if I’d missed some of what she’d been trying to tell me.

Kate said she feared failing me, when I got quiet and looked confused, as if she were too vague or difficult for another caring male. Perhaps in this sense her software language was safely developmental, a way of at least talking about her vanishing, that she had discovered, in a way that humanized her experience.  The same for our brain/mind discussions, which she told me she enjoyed!

Finally, I acknowledged, privately at least, inescapable echoes of my own paternal invisibility, with a rigidly intellectualizing father demanding I mimic his words and ideas. Thus Kate’s absences whispered a tyranny, bewitching my wordy defense against what menaced the “language home” I had adopted: an underlyingly symbolic “family feud.”

Wittgenstein (who himself had a tyrannical father) says that different definitions and uses of a word bear a family resemblance to one another, as with games themselves (like ping-pong and tennis, and various relational theories.)  As among actual families, some may find resemblance where others do not; such resemblance, too, may be hard to pin down.

What we hope to find with patients are co-created resemblances of spoken worlds, a kind of blended family. Such a process, of emergent specificity, is lived rather than described, even as we are asked at times to “sum up” our methods, our ways of thinking about the patient and how we hope to help.

But in stultifying surrounds terms often slip from their context; as Wittgenstein says, we cannot investigate everything. Words alone fail to fill the gap, though we can at least try to name said gap, familiar yet dreaded, giving words to the wordless dark, the sharing of a spoken human angst.  We meanwhile squint at the diffuse shape and outline of the cloudiness of our oceans—only after swimming in them, long enough to understand that we (like the patient) no longer feel at home.