WORDS AND INCANTATIONS – Talking Magic.

As someone who believes in the talking cure, based on words that try to capture inner experience, think it through, re-narrate it based on personal history, and share the entire process with another, in the context of a relationship, I have always thought that there is something magical about words and what we can do with them. Then, I found the following quote in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows:

“Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic.”

Albus Dumbledore speaking to Harry.

How incredibly true and profound.

We speak, and when we speak we initiate a potential communication, an elaboration of what we think, feel, and how we want to be known – or not, as the case may be. The magic of words lies in their ability to make us known to others, in their ability to reach beyond the semantic qualities of language and engage us with others. While there are many other ways of communicating, say through a glance, a facial grimace, a smile, a touch- words add specificity to communication. Words encapsulate thought and feeling, often linking it with memory. Words can create dialogues, moods, atmosphere, interpersonal connection- and they can also break them. Psychoanalysts often rely on words to begin building a narrative of patients’ lives, one that can be explored and understood a deux- in the context of a relationship.

Writers and poets avail themselves of this fact all the time. Think of the words of poets and authors, and their ability to transport us to foreign lands, reach our hearts, and make our imaginations run wild and access all matter of feelings within us. As someone who deals with words everyday and for many hours, I understand that words are truly magical, because they allow us to communicate inner experience, they build a bridge between our inside and the outside, and between our inside and the inside of another. Now that is magic!

Those of you who follow my posts know that I am fond of writing about the fact that words often fail us in capturing the complexity of human experience, but today’s post is on the power of words and words as a source of magic.

Words can do anything. They can soothe, caress, hurt, dictate, control, create- and therein lies their magic. In the end, words allow us to elaborate ourselves throughout our lives, whether they are spoken or written, whether they are said out loud to another or spoken quietly to ourselves. Words are a particular kind of human magic. A particular link between what is personally known and what is shared. Words build bridges; they are the blocks of interpersonal transmission, the Legos of relational contact.

We learn to think with words. Our thinking is made up of our particular and idiosyncratic vocabulary. In and of itself this is an incredible accomplishment: words label our inner experience and make it known and understandable to us, and also to others. Words organize all matter of inchoate experience for us; they literally begin our inner conversations. Our personal language is inextricably tied up to consciousness. Words bring experience into awareness, a conscious awareness. And words help us to process and understand our experience. When words fail us, so does understanding.

In treatment, words may not always be available, particularly when trauma has touched us. Then experience can be insulated in sensorial and somatic languages that have sequestered information from us because of its traumatic nature, because our psyche has not been able to hold it long enough to make sense of it and assimilate it. Such is the nature of trauma on the psyche. Such experiences often have to be re-lived and experienced with another who can help us put words to what is too painful and overwhelming to be spoken or thought. In such cases, words hold the power to heal- to bring understanding through a shared narrative that can be thought about and finally spoken.

In life, words connect us to others and to our experience of ourselves in relation to them. The words that we use and assign to someone or something carry a relational meaning, which continues to echo within us, and often within our interpersonal circle. Think about it, those who are close to us take us at our word. This is how they come to know us, and later, other non-verbal interactions fill in where words fail.

Yes, it is true that words can also fail us. When I sit with patients that are too pained and tortured to put words to their experience, I may offer my words, tentative and based on my experience of their experience, of what is being communicated through our relationship. My patients often revise my words, and so we go on to co-construct a narrative that begins to give relational meaning to what has been known to them but had remained unspoken because it lacked the words to be spoken. An incantation based on the magic of words.