Overcoming Psychological Pain
Say what you will about human beings. We’re self-important. We’re destructive. But we are also special. We have a superpower unique to us: a capacity for language. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison describes it like this: Word-work is sublime … because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. Our capacity for language is powerful. When I’m playing BeanBoozled with my nephew, I can use language to say, “This jelly bean MIGHT taste like mangoes and it MIGHT taste like rotten dead fish. It’s a mystery.” He doesn’t fully understand the word might. He’s four. In some ways, his behavior is not unlike that of non-human animals: controlled more by direct experience than by verbal reasoning. He sees a red and yellow jelly bean in my hand and his whole life history has taught him that eating it will...