Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[jasonlulu_2000]

Here is a puzzling sentence for your help.

He learns the usefulness of languages as a means of showing what he sees and gains skill and certainty in the expression of his experiences. To have given up one's experience to words is to have begun marking out the limits and its possible meaning. In the journal, that meaning is developed and becomes clear.

I couldn't understand "To have given up one's experience to words is to have begun marking out the limits and its possible meaning. In the journal, that meaning is developed and becomes clear."

Could any native help me out?


Thanks


Jason

[CP]

It is one thing to have an experience, another to discuss it or write it down. When we describe an experience, trying to put it into words, we have to explore the experience, make sense of it, give it meaning, find its limits. That is how we find meaning in an experience, according to this author.

Of course, we can find meaning in some nonverbal sense, but until we put the experience into words, that nonverbal meaning may remain unclear even to ourselves. Sigmund Freud understood this, and he understood that exploration of feelings, dreams, memories, emotions by talking about them to a careful listener and questioner helps the person to understand him / herself. His psychoanalytic method was sometimes called "the talking cure."
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