ABSTRACT
In psychoanalytic treatment, the power of self-truth remains unchanged unless challenged by perception, which is why enactments hold such powerful therapeutic potential. The experience of hearing a good poem or a good interpretation is of being understood and at the same time seeing something new about oneself that has been articulated by someone else from within that person’s own experience. In the terms of information theory, thought is a more or less computational procedure that can be described as the creation of symbolic representations that stand in for bits of information, followed by the complex linkage of these symbols to create higher-order information structures. Neither poetry, nor dreams, nor good psychoanalytic work is well described by information theory, because the conception of language found there is limited to the use of words as labels for packets of content. It seems desirable not to create two different boundaries, one for verbal meanings and the other for nonverbal meanings.
