ABSTRACT

This chapter begins the way communication gets started and how people develop both verbal and non-verbal ways of communicating that are inter-personal and also intra-personal; forms of communication over which executive functions such as intention and rational planning may have some control, and others where the unconscious is the 'talk'. It explores the nature of the relationships within which communication takes place and which profoundly influence experiences of those relationships and what people might learn within them. The chapter explores Winnicott's psychoanalytic explanation for the ways in which communication might begin. It considers the instantiation and difficulties associated with communicating with ourselves: of dreaming and thinking and maintaining the integrity of unconscious lives. The chapter explores one way to think about communication that is experienced as persecuting and another that might have space in which people can hold each other in mind – a place of inter-subjective third-ness.