Speaking the Unspeakable: “The Implicit,” Traumatic Living Memory, and the Dialogue of Metaphors

This essay makes two points: (a) Dualities between implicit and explicit—like the older ones between body and mind, primary and secondary process, nonverbal and symbolic, inner and outer, unconscious and conscious, emotion and cognition, and so on—can be understood as poles on a complex continuum of experience or as aspects of complex experiential systems; and (b) metaphor in dialogue can create a process of understanding between people and aspects of their experience that seem, on the face of it, to be very far apart or even beyond comprehension.