Talking to Oneself

1969 Bacon, Francis

When we see someone talking to themselves–and it is not obvious they are using their phone–we are always struck with horror.

What is that horror?

Perhaps it’s the degree. That someone’s madness can be so profound that they give it voice! People have been burned at the stake for such transgressions.  Perhaps it is the utter distrust we must now have for the person who uses such an essential tool so irresponsibly and unreliably.  How can we understand someone who has abandoned such a primal tool as speech?  “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”  But what if the word is the madness of a god?

So it is, we always put some distance between ourselves and the self-talker.  It’s almost as if we believe such behaviors are contagious. We almost want to point at him and say “he’s not with me! Poor wretch!”

And yet, we all talk to ourselves. In the shower, in the car, as a form of self-punishment, as a means of instilling bravery or confidence for some future action, talking to oneself is something akin to the way athletes visualize their victory before a competition.  We might say that such a behavior is the height of sanity.

So how delighted I was to discover two forms of talking to oneself that were a natural part of of the process of self knowledge.  Both of these come from my reading of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.  Here’s the relevant passage:

This “other being” is the other person in ourselves – that larger and greater personality maturing within us, whom we have already met as the inner friend of the soul. That is why we take comfort whenever we find the friend and companion depicted in a ritual, an example being the friendship between Mithras and the sun-god. This relationship is a mystery to the scientific intellect, because the intellect is accustomed to regard these things unsympathetically. But if it made allowance for feeling, we would discover that it is the friend whom the sun-god takes with him on his chariot, as shown in the monuments. It is the representation of a friendship between two men which is simply the outer reflection of an inner fact: it reveals our relationship to that inner friend of the soul into whom Nature herself would like to change us – that other person who we also are and yet can never attain to completely. We are that pair of Dioscuri, one of whom is mortal and the other immortal, and who, though always together, can never be made completely one. The transformation processes strive to approximate them to one another, but our consciousness is aware of resistances, because the other person seems strange and uncanny, and because we cannot get accustomed to the idea that we are not absolute master in our own house. We should prefer to be always “I” and nothing else. But we are confronted with that inner friend or foe, and whether he is our friend or foe depends on ourselves.

You need not be insane to hear his voice. On the contrary, it is the simplest and most natural thing imaginable. For instance, you can ask yourself a question to which “he” gives answer. The discussion is then carried on as in any other conversation. You can describe it as mere “associating” or “talking to oneself”, or as a “meditation” in the sense used by the old alchemists, who referred to their interlocutor as aliquem alium internum, “a certain other one, within” This form of colloquy with the friend of the soul was even admitted by Ignatius Loyola into the technique of his Exercitia spiritualia, but with the limiting condition that only the person meditating is allowed to speak, whereas the inner responses are passed over as being merely human and therefore to be repudiated. … But a real colloquy becomes possible only when the ego acknowledges the existence of a partner to the discussion….