Introduction

The hypothesis around which the book is organized is that there are two qualitatively different forms of conscious mental activity, each of which uses similar formal elements of language but for very different semantic purposes. The first of these is our “mother tongue” that begins in utero and is an expression of a mental process I call primordial consciousness. If early mother-infant attachment is secure, beginning around age two most of us develop a “second language” expressing reflective representational thought as part of the process of separation and individuation. Primordial consciousness remains selectively active throughout the course of our lives, its qualitative difference from reflective representational thought often unnoticed because both use the same formal elements of language expression. The bilingual model of mind illuminates problems in contemporary linguistic and psychoanalytic theories and the cognitive philosophy of thought that have arisen from the implicit assumption there is but a single mental process and language. Primordial consciousness is the foundation of many phenomena of everyday life, normal and pathological, that are described throughout the book.