ABSTRACT
Language bears a very long and complex relation to conflictual states, be they vis-a-vis external reality or inner psychic reality. For centuries, writers, sages and priests have cultivated and perfected the instrumentality of the spoken and written word as a way of regulating and organizing human experience, purposiveness and action. In recent years, both in psychoanalysis and in other disciplines, the need to view the whole human being as an existential entity has been stressed more frequently. Winnicott and Heinz Hartmann have contributed a great deal towards an understanding of those intractably silent states which we associate with the healthy individual. This chapter argues that the capacity for lying fallow is a function of the process of personalization in the individual. This process of personalization achieves its sentient wholeness over a slow period of growth, development and acculturation, and its true matrix is a hierarchy of relationships.
