Inexpressible existential experience — psychological basis for understanding the unthinkable

Abstract

The article is devoted to the psychological analysis of a new problem in the Russian psychology of understanding — understanding the unthinkable. Previously, it was substantiated that cognitive components of the phenomenon are reduced either to the incredible, impossible, what is diffi cult to imagine, or to the extraordinary, exceptional in terms of the degree of manifestation. The existential meaning of the “unthinkable” is associated with acceptance or rejection of the moral and social norms of human behavior in society, with inadmissibility of situations that are understood by most people as unthinkable. The novelty of the study is due to the original approach providing transition from categorical defi nitions of the unthinkable to the description of psychological mechanisms of its understanding. It is substantiated that one of them is an inexpressible traumatic existential experience. The study considers examples of such experience, analyzes semantics of the inexpressible, and identifi es its three main meanings: verbally “inexpressible” means unimaginable, indescribable, surpassing the means of verbal representation available to a person; “inexpressible” can mean bad, unwanted, or even hateful; “inexpressible” is what cannot be pronounced or said, qualifying a “sacred” object; one cannot speak of such an object, because it is outside the profane world and its language. It is shown that an inexpressible traumatic experience (experiencing the consequences of the Holocaust, manifestations of evil, a serious illness) indicates what cannot be expressed in words and contributes to generating an intrapersonal confl ict, in which the subject needs yet cannot express the unthinkable at the same time.

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