Between the Lines: Unconscious Meaning In Everyday Conversation
New York, Plenum Press, 1999
http://www.perseusbooks.com/index.html
 
 
CHAPTER 1
 

Slips Of The Mind: Introduction To Unconscious Meaning In Everyday Conversations
It's a fact hardly known only to professionals that in informal social conversation during coffee breaks, meetings, and other unstructured and informal moments that topics in the conversations seem to come and go rather haphazardly, apparently hopping from topic to topic in a nearly random way.  Little or no meaning is ascribed to these fragmented bits of conversation.  Most researchers attribute this sort of random small talk to a milling around process whose function is to simply help members get acquainted, a kind of phatic communion, as it's been called, where people find their way around the social and conversational terrain.  This small talk, then, sort of serves the same function as the scream of bats.

But is such topic-hopping, in fact, random, carrying little to no meaning?  The short answer is, "no," and is what this chapter is about.  The longer answer is what this book is about.  In this chapter I present examples of conversations from my small group dynamics laboratory and from everyday life which illustrate that social conversation is not random but also that there is unconscious meaning in those conversations.  The illustrations in this chapter are introductory and givej ust the flavor of more complex and important examples in the remaining chapters.  After presenting these initial illustrations, I briefly explain how our mind and our unconscious use of language constructs these unconscious meanings and lay out the way my method can be applied in everyday life and professional situations.  I also outline the importance of my method for understanding how our mind works.  Finally I introduce some specific guidelines to help in initially recognizing unconscious meaning.


Unconscious Meanings In Everyday Conversation
During the small-talk stage of conversation where we quickly hop from one topic to another, the important question is, why are certain topics brought into conversations at a particular time, and not others?  Is it coincidence, for example, in a conversation that's being openly tape recorded, there are repeated references to the CIA and FBI?  Is it coincidence that the topics of "God" or "policeman" frequently selected into discussions whose members have concerns about a leader, trainer, boss, or authority figure who is also in the discussion?  And is it coincidence that the topic of child/parent relationships is often selected into a conversation when members harbor concerns about the leader-authority relationship in the discussion.  Or is it an accident that the topic of "state employment being a rip off to taxpayers" occurs immediately following my return to a group meeting I was leading after being absent unannounced for two sessions?  No, it's no accident.

The topic of "state employment being a rip off to taxpayers" reflects members' resentment at my being absent from the meetings and thus feeling they were not getting what they paid for-just as taxpayers often feel ripped off because of the benefits government workers receive and which many workers in business world do not get.  Again, it's no coincidence that these topics are selected into the conversation at a particular time.  The apparently literal topics of CIA, FBI, God, policeman, parents, and children are "metaphorical" expressions of members' unconscious concerns about being tape recorded and about the authority figure in the conversation.  Unconscious concerns are metaphorically piggy-backed onto the meanings of what otherwise appear to be literal or conscious meanings.  It's a kind of talking in tandem, as it were.
To further illustrate: How does one explain, for instance, the ostensibly innocent statement of a person who has just bought a new car and who says he bought it because he was tired of driving old heaps--meaning an old wreck of a car--when his last name is Heapes?  Sounds like the wildest of coincidence, does it?  Or perhaps it's simply just an unconscious pun or double entendre? Or what does it mean when a retired gentleman is standing in front of a door with a heavy package in his arms and his son-in-law offers no help, and the retired gentleman just happens to look over at a young child who is pretending to help its mother carry a suitcase and says to the child, "That's very thoughtful of you to help out"?  Is this a conscious snide remarkdirected at the son-in-law?  Again, the answer is, "probably not."  What the gentleman's remark reflects is his unconscious feelings that this son-in-law is not very thoughtful.
Much of our everyday conversation, then, expresses more than the standard or literal meaning attached to it.  A further example: Years ago my wife and I bought a small rundown summer cottage in Maine where I grew up and knew quite a few people.  For the first couple of summers, we were so busy trying to make the cottage livable that we had no time to socialize.  At last the cottage was decent enough to invite some old friends for an evening of conversation.  Having not seen our guests for some years, the conversation was rapid fire and free-associative.  The initial small talk finally got around to discussing the cottage, so my wife and I proceeded to give our guests the "grand tour."  In the stream of conversation, one of our guests started telling us about attending a party given a few weeks before.  It seemed that the people who gave the party had just finished redecorating their home.  Sandwiched in between talking about the party, it was said "they only had the party to show off their redecorating work."  Unconsciously---and I believe it wasn't a conscious snide remark---the speaker's feelings about our motivation for inviting them were perhaps clear.
It's widely recognized, of course, that in everyday conversations certain euphemisms are often consciously employed to talk cryptically about some out-group person or group of people.  For example, students may want to talk about professors but may not want to say explicitly what they are feeling openly, parents may want to talk about children when they are present without them knowing they are being talked about, and one ethnic group may want to talk about another.  Such euphemisms like "you know how they are," may be used.  This is called "coded speech," where often everyone knows what's "really" being discussed.  But this is not what this book is about.  I'm not just talking about euphemisms, here.  I'm talking about deep encryption.
Such talk occurs with intimates and with relative strangers.  If we listen carefully to their talk, responses to the finer nuances of their feelings often become clear.  One evening my former wife and I were taking our evening walk, and I was rambling on, half incoherently and stumbling over my words, mispronouncing them and repeating syllables.  I had no sooner finished one of these broken sentences as we were passing one of those fences that look like they are woven, when my wife said---out of a myriad of things she could have said--"There's a fence with a broken spoke."  She was, in fact, unconsciously, commenting on the fact that I spoke(en) in a broken manner. Hence, "broken spoke."  Here we see the word spoke being used literally as a noun, referring to a connecting piece of wood in a fence and unconsciously as an adjective referring to my speaking (the archaic of spoke is a past participle of speak).  This is perhaps not a very important example, but it is poignant, as are the two following personal recollections.  The unconscious mind of the child is much closer to consciousness than the unconscious of an adult, as the work of Jean Padget, 1 the renowned Swiss psychologist, has clearly demonstrated.  Thus one might expect that unconscious meaning is closer to consciousness in children than in adults.  One Halloween evening, I was playing with my daughter, Melyssa.  I was playfully squeezing, hugging, and kissing her.  While doing this, she was trying to open her Halloween bag of goodies.  As she opened it and spied something within, she exclaimed, "Oh, it's one of those doodady things" (i.e., an unnamed or nameless gadget or trinket).  Unconsciously, she was acknowledging that I was engaging in those things that Daddy's do, i.e., doodady things.
The second example occurred in a restaurant one day.  My former wife and I were discussing and explaining pregnancy to our seven and a half year old daughter, Melyssa, who had some questions she wanted answered.  She had always been very curious about things.  We explained it as well as we could to a seven and a half year old.  When we seemed to have reached an appropriate end to our explanation, there was a slight pause and my wife and I began talking about the events of the day.  Then my daughter tugged on my sleeve, turned herself toward me, and asked, "What do you think of my shirt, Dad?"  On her shirt was a decal---at stomach level---of a banana that was depicted as a little child.  In unconscious or subliteral terms, my daughter's question was pregnant with the meaning her question was about.
As I briefly explained in the Introduction, the term subliteral indicates word meanings that are unconsciously attached to the conscious and accepted meanings of words, i.e., their literal meanings.  I coined the term subliteral for my approach to unconscious meaning, language, and mind for two important reasons.  First, the concept replaces traditional psychoanalytic terms like "latent," "unconscious," and "symbolic" meaning.  It also replaces the linguistic term "metaphorical" insofar as the term "metaphor" describes symbolic meaning in our language.  This name change is not just a semantic game, it's an important conceptual distinction.  This is why.
Historically, the psychoanalytic approach has rendered the interpretation of unconscious meaning a mystery for all but highly trained practitioners.  Although Sigmund Freud didn't invent the concept of the unconscious, Freud almost singlehandedly made us aware of the unconscious mind.  Freud's genius was to take the various notions of the unconscious that had been around for some time and organize them, connect new data to them (such as it was), and then to provide a new theory or framework of the un.conscious mind.  Seldom are discoveries made whole cloth, so to speak (see next chapter).  In any event, Freud's classic notion of the unconscious is not adequate to explain the kind of linguistic phenomenon that I describe in this book.  Even the many neo-Freudian reformulations of Freud's concept of the unconscious are not adequate. Freudian notions of the unconscious are much too vague, and psychoanalytic interpretations of an event often are all-meaningful.  A subliteral framework demystifies the deep dark Freudian unconscious (see chapters 8 and 12).
To anyone who understands my method, it will be clear in a discussion about identical twins in a group that has two leaders which twin in the discussion unconsciously refers to which of the two leaders.  Accordingly, it's no accident when a member of a conversation "Just happened" to talk about an old brand of cough drops called Smith Brothers, which as a trademark had a picture of two bearded men, one who had a black beard and one a reddish beard on its packaging, when one leader in the group had a black beard, the other a reddish beard.  No accident, indeed.  Semantically, then, the topic of "Smith Brothers" like the topic of identical "twins," was a parallel or tandem talk that unconsciously referred to the two leaders.  Just as to the theoretically informed physicist, certain marks observed in a bubble chamber mean the presence of a particular subatomic particle, so too, someone who is theoretically informed about my method can recognize that certain kinds of conversational cues and language mark the presence of unconscious or hidden thoughts and feelings.
Every intonation made, indeed, even some of the physical aspects surrounding a conversation are unconsciously registered on some level.  Normally, however, neither the person listening nor the person speaking is privy on a "conscious" level to the way these events are processed in the mind.  For example, my fiancee's mother recently visited her podiatrist to have her feet worked on.  As she lay on his couch having her feet massaged, they were talking to fill an otherwise silent activity.  As they did so, the podia said that his clients often told him very personal things about themselves as they lay on his couch.  My fiancee's mother replied that laying on a couch while having one's feet massaged is very relaxing and soothing.  She said it Was like being in a psychologist's office having therapy, so people would naturally have a tendency to "bare their souls" to you.  When she said this, she immediately became conscious of the double meaning: they bare their souls means they bare the soles of their feet to him.  This may appear to be a simple pun, but it's not (see chapter 7 for further analysis of this example).
Think about it for a moment.  We must ask, why these particular words were combined into this particular phrase?  There were many other words and phrases that could have been used (i.e., selected) to express the meaning she was expressing: that his patients tell him lots of personal things about themselves.  The similar sounds then used in her narrative are not simply puns.  Their meaning is created by using similar sounds.  Indeed, it's the sound of meaning. Puns have been given a bad rap.  They can, in fact, be a window into the complex tandem workings of our minds (see chapter 7).  There are levels of meaning, one literal in which each single concern creates a number of unconscious or subliteral variations that can be mapped (see below) and stacked upon each other in a mental matrix (see Figure 1).
These unconscious meanings may begin unconsciously and slip into conscious awareness, just as in slips of the tongue (Freudian slips), or what, in this chapter, I call slips of the mind.  Just as with the concept of the unconscious, that slips of the tongue have meaning wasn't invented by Freud.  They were long noted in literature, and he acknowledged this fact.  Often, it seems, a person or a circumstance comes to nearly usurp the identity of a idea or the meaning of a word.  Freud's genius was in recognizing their importance for a study of the mind.  Despite this historical reality, the terms unconscious mind and slips of the tongue have become welded to Freud's name.
The phrase slips of the mind first occurred to me when I was pondering puns and slips of the tongue in relation to the unconscious mind.  Then the analogous idea, slips of the mind, occurred to me.  Indeed, what I have come to call subliteral language is a kind of slip of the mind.  The question is, why did this concept occur to me at this particular time?  The semantic association based on the similarity of pun-like sounds and slips of the tongue is reasonably clear.  There were other conditions, however, that precipitated my association as I soon found out when I started thinking about it.  At the time the phrase slips of the mind occurred to me, I was thumbing through the many little yellow 2 x 3 inch slips of paper that I always kept with me to write down ideas and insights which often popped into my head at the oddest times.  Indeed, I was physically working with "slips" of the mind.  Because I have a computer and personal digital memo pad now, I no long need to keep those slips of paper.  Yet another crazy slip of the mind, as it were, occurred while I was a graduate student:
While taking graduate seminars, I frequently had these little yellow slips of paper spread in front of me.  I was constantly shifting through them and springing forward to write something down before I forgot the idea.  From time to time, I was aware of the other students and the professor looking at me rather strangely.  One day, seemingly out of nowhere and apparently unconnected to his lecture, the professor began to talk about a crazy colleague he once knew.  It seemed that whenever anyone went to his office his desk was strewn with pieces of paper that he wrote upon---even while people were talking to him.  The professor's story was a subliteral reference to my little slips of paper.  Indeed, the professor's story itself was a slip of his mind.  Although it may seem that the professor's remark was conscious, from the context of the situation, it didn't seem to be.
These double meanings can't be explained as simply slips of the tongue because slips of the tongue are merely the physical delivery mechanism for expressing slips of the mind.  Now it's perhaps becoming clear that talk has meaning other than the apparent and intended literal meaning of the speaker and by listening subliterally you can recognize the hidden feelings and opinions that people have but won't tell you.  This can be very useful.  But fair warning: Some of what you will hear may be things that "even your best friends won't tell you." Indeed, some things you many not want to hear (see Concluding Ethical Postscript at the end of this book).
What may not be clear at this point is how our mind uses language to create these slips of meaning.  To explain these slips of the mind, we need to take a brief excursion into understanding the nature of language, not Freudian psychoanalysis, for it's here that we will find the operations that make subliteral meaning and create slips of the mind.

How Slips Of The Mind Are Made
As a general introduction to the way the mind uses language to make meaning and to produce these slips of the mind, we need to understand the three basic components of language, semantics, phonology, and syntax.  Semantics is the study of the relationships between words and their meanings.  We have a large store of words and their meanings, which we have learned through the years, called a lexicon.  A lexicon is a dictionary in our minds from which we select the appropriate word to express an intended meaning.  Most words have many meanings.  This is called polysemy.  Words come to have meaning by being repeatedly connected or associated with past experience.  Some word concepts acquire meanings by comparing their meaning to other similar concepts and situations.  Typically this is called metaphor.  Other words have acquired meaning by their similarity of sound.  This similarity of sound brings us to phonology.

Phonology is the study of the elementary sounds (like "ba" for the letter b) that make up a language and the rules of their distribution and patterning that govern pronunciations.  On a less elementary level, the sound of an entire word can be similar to a word that has a different meaning.  For example, words like knight and night are called homophones.  Semantics and phonology mutually influence each other (as I explain later).  How we put meaning (semantics) and sound (phonology) together involves syntax.
Syntax is the study of the rules by which words or other elements of sentence structure are combined to form what we call grammatical sentences (the term grammar is a broader term including the arrangement of words, the combination of their component parts, and sometimes includes pronunciation and meaning).
I should point out that in applying the linguistic concepts of semantics, phonology, and syntax to explain how slips of the mind are created, I have extended the rather narrow and traditional meaning given to them by the field of linguistics.  Strictly speaking, although the concept of phonology deals with elementary sounds and their permissible combinations, these elementary sounds carry no semantic meaning.  I have raised the concept of phonology to a higher order or level, however, to include the sounds of whole words as in homophones and the sounds involved in puns......
I should point out here that much of what we think we are just discovering about the way language works is, in fact, not entirely new.  As I show in Part II of this book, along the way to becoming what we think of as rational, logical, and high tech beings, we either lost, ignored, or misplaced valuable knowledge that we now have to reconstruct in order to understand subliteral meaning and conversations.  "Progress" often doesn't proceed in a straight line.  Sometimes, as a recent movie title indicated, we have to go back to the future.
So, how does all of this apply to slips of the mind?  Semantically, the examples I gave about the topics of CIA, FBI, God, policeman, and childl/parent relationships can be seen as unconscious metaphors about authority relationships.  In other words, a CIA or FBI agent, a, boss, a policeman, a parent, or a God, all carry the same meaning: They are authorities.  Within our semantic lexicon each of these particular words is linked to a higher order or superordinate category.  On this level they are interchangeable semantically.  Thus, we can use any one of them in describing any other one.  Similarly the topic of identical twins is unconsciously connected to lexical items that refer to sets of "twos." Having two trainers in a T-group is unconsciously connected to the lexical item "twins" in our mental dictionary.  The item twins can be broken down into subcategories each of which contains certain descriptions of things double, like pairs or duets, which then can be further broken down into particular descriptions of a given pair.  Then, these unconscious templates can be matched or mapped (see later) onto people in one's surroundings.  This is exemplified by the illustration given previously where the physical description of the two Smith Brothers on the cough drop package, where one has a reddish beard, and one a black beard, matched the description of myself and my co trainer.
In terms of phonology, the example of my fiancee's mother at her podiatrist's office accessing similar sound meanings, allowed her unconscious mind to equate baring ones soul to baring ones sole.  A more complicated example is one where my wife remarked on a fence with a broken spoke.  This was a subliteral comment on my stumbling over words, mispronouncing diem, and repeating syllables.  Like homonymous terms, the word spoke can also mean speech, as in "he spoke.  "The semantic selection of the word broken was used "metaphorically" to refer to my stumbling, mispronouncing, and repeating syllables.  The particular order of the words in my wife's statement are an example of how syntax creates meaning.  Instead of saying, "There's a fence with a broken spoke~ "she could have said, "There's a slat broken in that fence," or "Look at that busted fence," or "Look at that busted fence spoke," or a host of other word orders.  But these arrangements of word order would not have done the job of the intended subliteral meaning.  Thus, a particular phrase is selected from our semantic and phonological lexicon, and ordered in a particular way because it best expresses an unconscious thought or feeling.  Puns are a paradigm that serve as a model for creating subliteral.  meaning......
Looking back on it, in my coining the term "slips of the mind," both semantic and syntactic considerations were operating.  Most everyone, of course, has heard of slips of the tongue and Freudian slips.  As I described above, conceptually, I combined slips of the tongue, Freudian slips, and an unconscious pun on the word slips.  My unconscious lexicon includes slips as slipping on a banana and, of course, slips as in slips of the tongue.  It also includes slips as in slips of paper.  But it gets even deeper.  A slip also means a particular piece of women's undergarments, which are often made of silk.  In writing on my little slips of paper, I was making notes about subliteral sexual examples.  Then, as I was thinking about Freudian slips, a joke popped into my mind, that Freudian slips are made of silk and lace.  Syntactically, the question is why did I not first come up with "mind slips?" The answer is that a mind slip doesn't mean the same thing as a slip of the mind.  First, the phrase slips of the mind is what I called previously a syntactic metaphor based on the same word order as slips of the tongue.  Slips of the tongue in the popular vocabulary has come to mean (thanks to Freud) unconscious meaning slipping out by a 11 mistake" of language.10 The concept mind slips associate more with accidents, as in the popular youth vemacular of a short time back, "mind skips." Thus unconscious semantics influenced unconscious syntax to create the exact meaning my mind evidently wanted.  This is, indeed, the stuff of poetry.
But slips of the mind don't just inform us of other peoples' unconscious feelings and thoughts.  As I just demonstrated, by understanding what I call the subliteral mind, it can also help us understand our own unconscious thoughts and feelings.  Another example of learning about oneself using subliteral analysis occurred when a colleague and I were discussing the validity of a piece of subliteral talk.  He was quite skeptical and was advancing what I considered were irrelevant arguments.  My feeling was that he just didn't understand, that, unlike myself, he was new at it, but I didn't say this to him.  In frustration, I decided to show him part of an article I had written that outlined some of the principles for establishing the validity of my subliteral material.  So, I said to him, "Look, let's start over again.  For beginners, let me show you an article of mine on the issue of validity."
Again, the question is why did I select the particular phrasing, "For beginners?" The phrase "for beginners" literally meant, "to start with" or "for openers." Subliterally, however, it revealed my feelings that he was new at understanding subliteral material, a novice, a beginner.  I could have said, "to begin with" or "to begin" or "beginning again," but these phrases would not have expressed my feelings as did the phrase "F or beginners."......
As I indicated at the opening of this chapter, ostensibly random or small talk has been considered by most researchers as a kind of "quantum" process, that is, that such talk is not subject to a Newtonian-like lawfulness as is most of the universe around us, including our biological, chemical, genetic, neuronal, and linguistic selves.  There is no a priori reason, however, why the human mind and our conversations should be any less structured and lawful "'an the rest of nature.  Indeed, as in physics, why should there not be cognitive "quarks" of the mind, fundamental meaning-structures from which all others are generated?  Indeed, this book is based on the Einsteinian assumption that "god does not play dice," that our mental universe is just as ordered as our physical universe and is not the result of chance.
Now, increasing research on unconscious processes is beginning to emerge from the study of language and from cognitive science research that points to unconscious meaning.  I describe this fascinating story of understanding the psychoanalytic and the cognitive unconscious mind in more detail in chapter 8.  In the meantime, let me illustrate the linguistic framework for what I call subliteral meaning.

Language And Mind
To avoid endless interpretations, I have adapted the framework of modern linguistics, called generative grammar, that was created by Noam Chomsky (b. 1928), the renowned linguist.  Chomsky revolutionized the study of language in his book, Syntactic Structures, and its relationship to cognitive psychology in his book, Language and Mind.  According to Chomsky, language is made possible by innate structures that generate all languages and all possible grammatically correct sentences." More important, for subliteral meaning, however, is his notion of the surface and deep structures of sentences and their multiple cognitive or semantic representations. For example, the following classic sentences demonstrate such multiple internal representations and meanings that underlie a single surface structure of a sentence:
 
1.  Surface structure:  The shooting of the hunters bothered him.

Representation 1:  The killing of the hunters bothered him.
Representation 2:  The sound of the hunters shooting their guns bothered him.
 
2.  Surface structure: Flying airplanes can be dangerous.
Representation 1:  Flying in airplanes can be dangerous.
Representation 2:  Airplanes flying in the air above you can be dangerous.
 
Many sentences have this surface structure and multiple deep structures or internal representations---what Chomsky has called deep structure ambiguity frorn which multiple meanings are generated.  Thus, sentences have a surface or literal meaning and a deep structure that in my adaptation may generate subliteral meaning.
In the example cited previously, where my wife and I gave our guests the "grand tour" of our newly renovated cottage, and one of the guests told a story about attending a party a few weeks previous, saying that the hosts of that party that "only had the party to show off their redecorating work," my interpretation of the guest's subliteral meaning of that statement was that my wife and I just had the party to show off our renovations.  Put into the previous lin guistic framework, this statement looks like this:
 
1.  Surface structure:  They had the party only to show off their redecorating work.
Literal Representation 1:  The hosts of the party we had attended a few weeks ago had the party only to show off their redecorating work.
Subliteral Representation 2:  You are having this party only to show off your newly renovated cottage.
 
In addition to the parallel situation of hosts having a party after completing renovations, the pronoun they is the ambiguous element in the sentence that can be cognitively used to link two different representations (see Appendix, 6.6. Pronoun Operations).
In adapting Chomsky's linguistic framework, I should mention a number of very significant differences.  First, structural linguistics does not deal with metaphorical language and symbolic meaning very well.  Second, underlying representations do not reflect intentional and motivational (psychodynamic) processes.  Moreover, unlike structural linguistics, my adaptation takes issue with the standard distinction between literal versus figurative language.  I address this latter issue in more detail later.

The Subliteral Unconscious
In addition to my concept of the subliteral to replace the linguistic term metaphor and the psychoanalytic concepts of latent and symbolic, I developed the concept of the subliteral unconscious to carve out a more concrete and specific set of processes from the the nearly all-meaningful notion of an unconscious mind.

That much of our linguistic processes are unconscious is not new.  It's universally accepted, for example, that most of our normal use of language is not conscious.  As we speak, we are unaware of the hundreds of rules of grammar that we use.  Nor can most of us render them conscious if we tried-mainly because we didn't learn most them consciously.  The grammar we learned in school is only a minute portion of the total number of syntactic structures.  But there is more to unconscious language processes than mere syntactic rules.
In the subliteral mind, these unconscious language processes are linked to emotional and feeling processes.  But these feelings are not simply raw feelings.  They exhibit primitive cognitive structures (see chapter 6).  Together, subliteral language and an underlying specific set of unconscious perceptions and cognitive operations that I have found in my research constitute what I call the subliteral mind.  So the subliteral mind is not a vague black hole in the mind as much theorizing about the unconscious is.  Moreover, and contrary to most cognitive science research and classic psychoanalytic theory, the subliteral unconscious "thinks" and "reasons" just like our conscious mind.
Accordingly, I would like to point out that though this book is clearly about hidden meaning in everyday language and how to recognize it, in describing this process my intent is to introduce linguistic and cognitive operations that have not been generally recognized, and also, more importantly, to introduce a new view of the mind.  I would like to note that the purpose of my research and findings about small group conversation have always been secondary to their implications for perception, cognition, and the way the mind works.  As we will see later, even conscious conversation is not so simple.

Interpretation: Of Hermeneutics And Hermenauts
At this point, I need to say a few words about the way we understand what words mean in everyday conversations.  In the beginning, we are told in Genesis, was the Word---but unfortunately, its meaning didn't come with it.  Meaning creation is born of our interpretation of the word.  Spoken words, by themselves, are simply arbitrary sequences of sounds in search of meaning.  Similarly, written words are merely a sequence of arbitrary marks or scratches in search of coherence.  Only through constant and consistent association and social agreement do arbitrary sounds and scratches come to have consensual meaning.  Even so, the everyday agreed upon meaning taps only a small proportion of those associations and agreements.

Furthermore, the socially agreed upon meaning of those sounds and scratches is not all that precise.  We make our meaning, as the conversation between Alice and Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, suggests, "When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean-neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you CAN make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master---that's all."
Thus, the meaning of the words that we use in conversation are in constant need of interpretation in the specific context in which they are used.  Males mean one thing by certain words, and females may mean another.  Similarly, people in different socioeconomic classes and ethnic groups may mean different things by the same word......
In a very real sense we are all messengers of meaning.  We interpret the words we hear.  We are hermenauts exploring semantic space.  Understanding everyday conversations is not a simple process, especially when we leave the standard expectations and assumptions surrounding a piece of talk.  In leaving the security of standard, consensually agreed upon meaning, the ambiguity of a piece of talk becomes evident, and the awareness of the complexity by which we derive meaning also stands out in bold relief.  Then, the problem is figuring out the rules to interpret correctly what we are hearing.  For example, how do we know that the literal meaning of the word "twins" in a conversation also subliterally refers to the two dominant members in the conversation?  Or how do we know when a seemingly literal conversation of "movie personalities" is subliterally about certain people in the conversation?  How we can know these meanings is what this book is about......

The Usefulness And Importance Of The Subliteral Mind In Everyday Life
Other than perhaps finding unconscious meanings fascinating, the phenomenon is useful in everyday life for understanding how the mind works.  As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, there are many situations in everyday life where information about the social situation is difficult or impossible to obtain.  Information regarding individual concerns, feelings, and attitudes may be intentionally (or unintentionally) withheld because of social taboos and the many rules of social etiquette.  At work, fear of the "boss" or certain co-workers or the reward system may lead to withholding the true feelings that people have about one another.

Subliteral communications are a kind of coded message, and learning to understand and decode them can function as a kind of personal "surveillance" system that gathers interpersonal "intelligence" data.  Our subliteral brain/mind is a bioelectronic detection device for picking up and monitoring people's underlying feelings and concerns.  In addition, you can also learn to tune in on your own unconscious feelings and attitudes about people and situations by listening to yourself talk.  As I noted previously, our conscious, literal talk leaves traces of underlying feelings and concerns.  It's a psychological equivalent of the physicists "bubble chamber" where traces of unconscious particles of thought and meaning can be tracked and analyzed, just as physicists track subatomic particles.  Thus, it is useful in finding out what's going on, in finding out what your spouse, your boss, or your friends are not saying, or what they are "really" saying and feeling.  In short, my method is a new and useful interpersonal and cognitive skill.

In Therapeutic Settings
My subliteral method can also be used to train mental health therapists and counselors, engaged in individual cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic, or group therapy.  The importance of the metaphors that clients use in psychotherapy have been recognized for some time."  As in everyday life, the method can provide therapists with valuable information about patients' unconscious attitudes, feelings and thoughts that patients may not want to reveal or of which they are not even aware.  To use a phrase from Freud, the subliteral method can be a "royal road to the unconscious."

Freud originally used dreams and hypnosis to access a patient's unconscious but soon gave up on this method.  Then, he switched to free association, which some psychoanalysts still use.  Compared to my subliteral method, free association is like trying to put together the scrambled pieces of an abstract painting puzzle.  More importantly, perhaps, recognition of these unconscious processes may also turn out to be a unique and powerful therapeutic method.  I address this latter possibility in chapter 12 where I explain the new psychotherapy of the psychiatrist Robert Langs.
A great number of social and psychological support groups have sprung up over the years.  There are literally thousands across the country.  Most of these groups have conversations about problems and issues that their members have.  These range from Alcoholic Anonymous groups, to single parent groups, to just simply people who want to talk about life and hear others do the same.  These groups are made to order for applying my subliteral method.  Whether as a counselor or as a member, listening subliterally in these groups can reveal a wealth of useful information not revealed consciously that can help individuals.  Likewise listening subliterally can be useful for those who manage, lead, or take part in the increasing number of small groups or teams used in the business world.

In Practical Research
In addition to the everyday importance of subliteral phenomena, the discovery of the subliteral mind has rich research implications for understanding and discovering aspects of language and mind that we didn't know and as a method for unobtrusively acquiring information.  For example, one of the long-standing problems in social psychology (and other areas) involves the use of questionnaires to assess people's attitudes and preferences.  Responses to questions are notoriously unreliable measures of what people really think.  People often give answers that they think are expected.  In addition, what they think their attitudes or beliefs are often do not reflect what they actually do.  For example, who are going to admit-perhaps even to themselves these days-that they have racial and gender prejudices?  As a consequence, social psychologists have begun to develop what are called "unobtrusive methods" of measuring attitudes, i.e., methods that assess attitudes without the person being aware that they are being assessed.  My subliteral method is, in fact, an unobtrusive method for assessing what people "really" think without them knowing that they are revealing anything, and thus their "answers" are less subject to conscious distortions......

Recognizing Subliteral Conversations: Introductory Principles
Before proceeding to the rest of this book, it will be helpful to present some introductory principles for recognizing and assessing whether the subliteral material already mentioned and the wealth of examples in the chapters to follow are "real" or are simply due to coincidence.  During the past twenty years, I have developed a systematic qualitative method divided into fifteen major catqgories that have more than seventy separate cognitive and linguistic procedures for parsing, analyzing, and validating subliteral language and stories.  This methodology provides the rules for parsing or breaking down the components of the stories and the language used to tell them.  It also provides the rules for analyzing the parsed components, and for establishing the validity of the parsing and analysis."

In presenting the many illustrations in this book, however, it is impossible to apply my complete methodology to each one.  To do so would make this book too unwieldy, complex, and tedious.  When it flows smoothly, I note how the example given illustrates some aspect of this methodology.  I have included an outline of the complete methodological procedures and operations for analyizing and validating of subliteral language in the Appendix.
Although it's necessary to apply the methods carefully to each subliteral occurrence for research and to establish the validity of subliteral material, for everyday use, however, this may neither be possible nor necessary.  Once the principles and methods are understood, many subliteral instances can be quickly evaluated.
 
Principle # 1:   Conversational Conditions:  The optimal conditions for generating subliteral material is one of low social structure, ambiguity, uncertainty, and anxiety.  The more conversation floats freely, the more likely it is that unconscious processes are activated and subliteral meaning is involved in the literal topics.
Principle # 2:   Knowledge of the Situation:  The more one knows about the conversational situation, i.e., the context, about the people in the situation, the issues, conflicts, expectations, etc., the better one can recognize subliteral talk.
Principle # 3:   Affiective Arousal:  Under the previous conditions, when affective arousal levels are elevated, they create a cognitive state in which nonconscious affective schemas are activated that merge with and shape conscious literal linguistic schemas.
Principle # 4:   Affective Loading:  In addition to general affective arousal, subliteral material is optimally generated from specific, emotionally loaded issues and concerns.
Principle # 5:   Social Censoring:  The more social taboos, rules of etiquette, and other social rules that preclude the open expression of feeling and ideas, the more likely subliteral talk occurs.
Principle # 6:   Silences:  The more awkward silences and pauses in a conversation, the more likely subliteral talk occurs.
Principle # 7:   Conflict:  The more conscious or unconscious conflict that exists between or among members of a conversation, the more likely subliteral talk occurs.
Principle # 8:   Association:  A topic is often subliteral if it's associated in time, i.e., merely comes after another topic (especially after a silence or pause in the conversation).
Principle # 9:   Topic Selection:  Subliteral topics are "selected-in" because they relate to participants' feelings that occur in the conversation.  It's important to recognize an incredible number of topics are possible in any conversation.  The question is, out of all the possibilities, why are particular topics selected?
Principle # 10:   Lexical Selection: In addition to the selection of topics, the selection of a given word or phrase also constitutes a choice from a large number of possible equivalent lexical (i.e., our mental dictionary of words with their associated morphemes and sounds) or semantic choices.
Principle # 11:   Mapping: Subliteral material is present in a piece of literal discourse when it can be demonstrated that the talk has a dual structure which can be mapped onto the conversational setting (see Appendix, 1.1. Analogical Matching Operations, and 1 .2. Isomorphic Mapping operations).  For example, a literal conversation about:
 
Representation 1.  (a) four people in a bar, (b) two of whom are male and two female, who (c) are being boisterous, and who (d) are dominating the social interaction can be hypothesized as subliteral when the membership composition and interaction in the conversation corresponds to the ostensibly literal story:
Representation 2.  (a') four group members, (b') two of whom are male and two are female, who (c') are being boisterous, and who (d') are verbally dominating the group interaction.
 
Having presented the general principles of how to recognize subliteral language, I now can turn to the next chapter.  But first, a couple of important concluding points:

Conclusion
It's probably clear by now that there is always the danger of imputing unconscious meaning where it doesn't exist.  Although this is true of analyzing the meaning of all linguistic communication, it's especially true for subliteral meaning.  Admittedly, many of the illustrations presented and those to come strain---almost to the breaking point---the bounds of what we think is reasonable and, also indeed, what we think is cognitively possible.  I developed my methodology to guard against reading too much into the Meaning of a piece of talk.  Skeptics and critics of slips of the mind have to earn their naysaying by countering this methodology.  It's not acceptable simply to say that it's all just a wild bunch of coincidences.  I might note in this regard that the methods and procedures I have developed provide many more rules for analyzing subliteral meaning than we consciously have for analyzing the conscious meaning of everyday language.

As you read through the myriad of illustrations in this book, they can be read according to one's interest.  First, they can simply and generally be read as interesting demonstrations of subliteral meaning.  Second, they can be read as revealing, in important new ways, how we creatively use language.  Third, they can be read as revealing group dynamics that might otherwise go unnoticed.  Fourth, the subliteral meanings can be read as revealing a great deal about the underlying dynamics of social life.  Fifth---and this is their seminal importance---they can be read as revealing how the subliteral unconscious mind works.
Finally, although some of the narratives are inherently humorous with others styled in a light-hearted manner, don't be fooled by this entertaining motif, for you will be witnessing some of the most profound operations of the human mind yet recognized.