The Abstracted Other - Projected Inner Speech
There is commonly understood to be but one secondary process, one which involves the conscious mind. However, there are those who have a more complicated secondary process, one influenced and projected upon and by from the preconscious mind.
When there is breakdown in the brain between what is normally reserved for dreams or intuition, and what is normally just thoughts and feelings, there is a phenomena popularly known as hearing voices. Auditory hallucinations, that are represented by inner speech.
It is like having a second primary process aspect, that mimics the speech of everyday life, but instead of being able to have body language cues governing the customs of speech, there are instead somewhat disembodied voices speaking to one another, to the person who hears them.
That this occurs is a known fact. There are many hypotheses about what causes it, most notably changes in the brain that increase as one ages. It is agreed that it is a symptom of schizophrenia, and that most, if not all, schizophrenics experience this at some time or other.
What is not understood is the internal representation of this, and why it can occur in a psychological sense, not just a physiological sense. No one who has experienced this phenomena has to my knowledge written about it in a coherent notion of psychological cause and effect.
Why put a brain aberration in terms psychological, and not just accept that this occurs during the course of the disorder?
I think it comes down to telling the public what is going on in a believable sense, giving hope to those who might benefit from the insight of some writer who has experienced what they experience, and goes through the same sets of doubts and misunderstandings. Someone who sets the record aright about the large quantity of thoughts given to one and the thoughts these generate in response to the overwhelming need to understand the reason why these occur.
So I will generate a theory based on my experience as a person with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and attempt to explain the psychodynamics that I attach to such experience. It is at least a start to put into words my thoughts and feelings, and hope that this message reaches others with hope and respect for what they have experienced. It might be helpful to compare notes with researchers, and in general express my thoughts that I have not been able to share with my therapist, through the rigors of talk therapy, due to my own difficulty in explanation without notes, and the time limit imposed by a therapy session.
My theory is that inner speech is projected inner speech, that is, it is projected onto a projection screen in the manner a movie projector would project the sound from the film soundtrack, but not always with the images intact. I believe that there is a reason for this behavior of the brain. It is under stress from the environment, which causes it to hallucinate these projected inner speech acts, according to the needs and understanding of the unconscious mind. But in my understanding of the unconscious mind, we are all like trees, whose uppermost branches are the only ones which represent thoughts and somewhat lower the branches which express abstract feelings, and lower still concrete subjects of thought and emotion. There the conscious mind ends, and the trunk, the preconscious, leads down into the depths of the roots, which are only normally available to cognitive access during R.E.M. sleep or what is known as a dream.
Furthermore, I think we are like trees in that our branches sometimes mingle, and this represents speech and body language. At the roots, however, the roots can’t use body language, but they sometimes mingle with the soil and the other trees’ roots. This represents dreams, and our unconscious cognitive set of data that impacts the other trees’ dreams. The roots are the projectors of inner speech, but through the trunk, the preconscious filter. The filter alters the projections according to what the unconscious and conscious circumstances tell it to. It acts as a two way bridge, while conscious, and unconscious both, for signals coming from other trees’ roots. It is like tickling someone’s foot and causing them to laugh, in that a vocalization issues from a stimulus that incites an impulse to vocalize.
The brain has developed altered pathways through the regard of these stimuli from the roots of the environment, and has been given impulses that the conscious mind interprets as speech. It is disconnected, very surreal speech, that is very much like a film of a soundtrack from a dream, except that the faces can not be clearly seen, nor the environment often perceived in any great detail. So one is left wondering what this means, because listening to a film without visuals does tell a story, but only if you can actively imagine it, instead of view it. And often the imagination is not fit for this task, so the meaning is obscured. If one knows how to interpret speech well, one might guess. But such takes practice, and knowledge of what body language corresponds to speech, instead of the usual order of what speech corresponds to body language, and may be difficult, and sometimes impossible to determine what each vocalized utterance might signify.
Dream interpretation and knowledge of psychology does stabilize the perception of these projections of inner speech that occur during the day instead of at night, while one is dreaming, and viewing the characters in the dream interact. I contend that if the narrative were a dream, and one could always see all of the drama involved in the hearing of the voices, it would make sense. It is like having a waking dream, that sometimes repeats, and sometimes makes sense, and at other times, requires an excellent dream interpreter to make sense of.
Patients often don’t realize this, though, and they are left believing they are telepathic, which as an impression is almost totally accurate as to what it seems to be. However, almost always, and this should be pointed out to patients, the messages of the projected voices are almost always known in the unconscious before they are heard spoken by the voice. And the voices respond to what the mind interprets them, in a fluid and sometimes shifting, and sometimes persistent way.
It is like the experience I had once hearing a squirrel appear to speak into my mind. It said something that I instinctively and unconsciously already knew, but was consciously not fully aware of, when it was spoken. The squirrel was telling me that women don’t understand what marriage is. However, it is a fact that squirrels don’t know what marriage is either. So I was interpreting something that came from within my mind, somewhere. Or else this would not manifest directly in my mind. Or rather, my brain somewhere is sending signals that my mind interprets as coherent speech, of a kind only possibly known in my unconscious mind, or dreams.
That voices of this kind can be bidirectional would be misstating the case. But they are bidirectional as projections, because they are based on a projection screen, in this case the squirrel. And what I expect to hear, based on what my unconscious needs me to know, is what will be projected as the squirrel talking in my mind as a projected inner speech act.
People also sometimes serve as projection screens for projected inner speech. Sometimes I will be looking at someone with curiosity, and will hear the person’s voice in my mind, telling me something that upon looking at the environment, seems totally appropriate. But if the situation changes, and upon talking to that person, I learn something that counteracts that intuition, and grounds it in further knowledge, any voice heard in that person’s voice will adopt the more real character instead.
I believe that this is because the unconscious mind adapts to new stimuli from recording the environment, and the verbal gestures of other people and myself. So if some prevailing intuition proves incorrect, the projection screen will sound back more intelligently and more accurately to what I can verify with my senses.
For this reason, I think schizophrenics need to watch lots of television and movies, and read lots of books, if not write books and movies and plays and things that piece together more materials to draw inferences from. This reveals the source of the voices to be internal, because one is aware more so that what one writes, reads, and views, changes the intercourse of the voices’ possible repertoire. There is a real psychophysical causation between the schizophrenic and the world, that should be representational, so as to facilitate reality testing in therapy.
Voices very often, almost always, have the character and seeming intentionality of thoughts, in my long experience. Almost never, past my initial year of having one occasional command voice, do the voice sound like real voices, that my ears can seem to hear. They always have an internalized, in-the-mind-only quality to them. Now it is like standing in the middle of a room of people that I can only hear and not see. It feels that these voices are invasive, and unwelcome. I receive lots of projected inner speech that is threatening and abusive. All in all, I have to say this is all because of the need for representation. These voices just want to be heard by me, from me, and they want to be represented. It is case probably of a repressed set of creative selves who wish to come out and play creatively with me, or just to be characters that I write about.
In fact, writing about my inner characters that speak to me in projected inner speech, often points out misunderstandings between me and other people from my past, who no longer interact with me. If I hear their voice, I tell them what I wrote about, and this alters that voice, not only within my mind, but within my dreams, as well. If I merely spoke that to the voice, and hadn’t written about it, it would lack a sort of cognitive force to it. It would be like merely speaking, and not creatively including the other voice into the personal contact with my creative self.
It is sort of like having a fragmentary creative self, that got fractured by some trauma, and became diffused throughout my brain. Putting these pieces back together again requires a creative willingness to write and draw things out on my part. It is inspiration for lots of creativity, but often also impedes progress because of the inconvenience of having my routine disturbed. But owning that my routine includes voices of the abstracted self does lead to wholeness. Setting aside time to write down what the voices have told me every day helps me cope, and alters the voices according to real input. I don’t believe that this activity further fragments my creative self. It tends towards wholeness and integration. It really all hinges on talking or writing about the issues at stake with each projected speech act.
It helps to regard these projected speech acts as not just disembodied voices. It helps to feel for them like they are long lost relatives of oneself. Voices are a real class in empathy and development of the tripartite mind, though in a notoriously chaotic way. It seems that the fragmented self in my case is mostly id related, that is to say a trauma caused a repression of the id, which then wanted back into my wholeness by the only route available to it, given that my dreams might have spillover, or blocked content, possibly also repressed as a part of the id. In fact, I can conceive of the different characters in these voice projections might actually all be fragments of a repression of the part of the id that is blocked from unconscious contact with itself. Almost as though they are banished from dreams by a repressive force blocking my dreams. Their only avenue toward being heard is to escape the unconscious fragmented state by speaking to my conscious mind, which, upon hearing them out, and recording what they say, can reintegrate these alternate selves with itself.
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