The genesis of symbolic behavior, considered both ontogenetically and phylogenetically, is an all-or-none change, involving a symbolic threshold. As Sapir observed, there are no primitive languages. Every known language is an essentially perfect means of expression and communication among those who use it. As Helen Keller put it, once she knew what water “was,” she had to know what everything else was. The greatest difference between the environment (Umwelt) of a sign-using organism and the world (Welt) of the speaking organism is that there are gaps in the former but none in the latter.* The nonspeaking organism only notices what is relevant biologically; the speaking organism disposes of the entire horizon symbolically. Gaps that cannot be closed by perception and reason are closed by magic and myth. The primitive has names for edible and noxious plants; but he also has a name for all the others: “bush.” He also “knows” what lies beyond the horizon, what is under the earth, and where he came from.
The distinction between Welt and Umwelt has been made before. Buber characterizes man as the creature who has a world and sets it at a distance, beyond the operation of his drives and needs. But, insightful as such an observation may be, it is of doubtful value to the behavioral sciences until it can be grounded in a coherent theory of symbolic behavior.
The being-in-the-world. Here again, my element is different from the Dasein of the existentialists, akin as the latter is to the transcendental subject of Kant and Husserl. It is no more than a working concept arrived at through the necessity of giving an account of the organism who participates in symbolic behavior. The organism who speaks has a world and consequently has the task of living in the world. It is simply inadequate to describe him in the organismic terms of adjustment, adaptation, needs, drives, reinforcement, inhibition, and so on. A psychiatric patient is, to be sure, an organism in an environment. He is also a creature who is informed by his culture. But he is something more. He is an organism who may not forgo the choice of how he is going to live in his world, for the forgoing is itself a kind of choice by default. It becomes pertinent to ask in what mode he inserts himself in the world. May has suggested that it sometimes seems more appropriate to ask a patient Where are you? rather than How are you? Certainly, becoming aware of the threshold of symbolic behavior makes one very curious about modes of existence: How does the person go about living in his world?
The intentional or quasi identity between the symbol and that which is symbolized. The mysterious “unreal but imputed” relation between the symbol and its designatum, the “wrong” identification of word and thing which the Polish semanticists condemn, never really fitted into a behavioristic theory of meaning. How did it come about that responding organisms imputed an unreal semantical relation between signs and things? How does an organism behave perversely by making a semantic identification at the “wrong” level of abstraction? What kind of organon is the unified science of signs when symbolic behavior is recognized as such by the formal sciences but disqualified by the natural sciences?
Once it becomes clear that what is to be studied is not sentence forms but particular language events, it also becomes clear that the subject of investigation in this instance is not the sentence itself but the mode in which it is asserted. The sentence can be studied only by a formal science such as grammar or logic, but a sentence event is open to a rich empirical phenomenology that is wholly unprovided by what passes currently as semantics. Nor can a neobehavioristic psychology make sense of assertory behavior; it can only grasp a sequence of space-time events which it attempts to correlate by constant functions. But assertion — the giving of a name to a thing, this is water, or the declaring of a state of affairs, the water is cold—is not a sequence. It is a pairing or identification of word and thing, class and thing, thing and attribute, and so on. Stimulus and response events are studied by a quantitative science. But the quasi identification events of symbolic behavior can be grasped only by a qualitative phenomenology. This qualitative scale must take account not only of true-or-false-or-nonsense statements (water is cold, water is dry, water is upside down), but also of various modes of magic identification. It does not suffice, for example, to say that the assertion of a Bororo tribesman of Brazil, “I am a parakeet,” is false or nonsense. Nor is it adequate to say that it is false scientifically but true mythically.* It is necessary to understand the particular mode of identification of a particular language-event.†
Sentences exhibiting the same syntactic and semantic structure may be asserted in wholly different modes of identification. For example, the sentence “My son John has become a roentgenologist” has the logical form of the assertion of class membership, a? A. It has this form regardless of the particular language event in which it is asserted. The sentence can be asserted in more than one mode, however. Thus, if a psychiatrist should hear his patient utter the above sentence, he may very well understand, knowing her as he does, that she is asserting a magic mode of class membership. Her son John has gone off to a scientific place where he has undergone a mystical transformation and emerged as a roentgenologist. Another patient may assert the same sentence and be quite clearly understood to mean that her son has acquired a skill which it is convenient to speak of as a class membership.*
The action sentence “John treats patients with X-rays” may also be asserted as a transparent vehicle intending a nonmagic action not utterly different from everyday actions of pushing, pulling, hitting, shooting, and so forth. Or it may be asserted magically: John makes a scientific pass with his paraphernalia and his ray, and the patient is cured.
The connotations of words themselves, apart from assertory behavior, undergo a characteristic semantic evolution which can be understood only by a science proper of symbolic behavior, for it is the particular word event which is studied and not the “semantic rule” by which it is applied to its designatum. The scale ranges from the almost miraculous discovering power of the word-vehicle as a metaphor in the hands of the poet, to its sclerosis through usage and familiarity until it becomes a semantic husk serving rather to conceal than to disclose what it designates. When Shakespeare compares winter trees with
Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang†
the words come as fresh as creation from the symbolizer and serve to discover for the reader what he too saw but did not know he saw. But when, in everyday conversation, I tell you, “Last summer I went abroad and had some interesting experiences and saw some historical sites,” the words act as biscuit cutters carving up memory into the weariest shapes of everyday usage.*
THE SYMBOLIC STRUCTURE OF A THERAPIST-PATIENT COMMUNICATION EVENT
To determine how the generic structure of symbolic behavior is relevant to the therapist-patient relation as an instance thereof, I shall consider briefly a hypothetical language event.
Patient: “Here is a dream which may be of some interest to you. Since you are an analyst, I am sure you will agree it has psychiatric implications.”