CLEFT TONGUEis an attempt to think through the psychic language and its diverse forms and modes of expression, both within psychic structure as well as in the inter-personal realm.
Wilfred Bion (1977), in his paper on the caesura, argues that in order to hear what happens inside it, one has to listen beyond the sound of spoken words. The type of attention he proposes is very reminiscent of the kind of listening to musical `overtones`. This listening identifies something that is not only beyond tones but beyond tonality as such: it is located outside the music scale though it emerges from it and is related to it. This kind of attention picks up what is hidden inside tonality but lacking any formal representation. At stake here are the floating elements, those that use another frequency and hence also require a different mode of reception. It is the overtones of the various musical instruments that are responsible for their vocal and tonal singularity. In analytic listening, as in listening to music, the ear must attend closely to the distinctive, singular core. It is this type of listening that the present chapters, dealing with the diverse psychic idioms, address. The author`s intention is not only to outline the dialectic far-end textures, that is, to describe the paradigmatic instances of each psychic category, but also to identify these typical syntactic zones in their simple, everyday manifestations in ordinary language and in the non-pathological personality
