God of the Unconscious
For You created my innermost parts; You wove me in my mother’s womb.
I will give thanks to You, because I am awesomely and wonderfully made; wonderful are Your works, and my soul knows it very well. Psalm 139:13-14 NASB
Innermost parts – We assume, correctly, that the Hebrew kilyotāy’ in this verse isn’t about kidneys (its literal translation). As Oswalt notes, in ancient Hebrew the word is often used “as a symbol of the innermost being.”[1] But what does that really mean? What is our “innermost being”? We’re not Greek, so we won’t make the mistake of thinking David is writing about the “soul.” But if we’re not careful, we might exclude some pretty important elements of “innermost being.” We might be tempted to think of kilyotāy’ as consciousness, that “what makes me me” descriptive list of who I am. The problem is that any descriptive list of who I am leaves out what can’t be described (articulated) of me—my unconscious. If we take David’s poetry seriously, we will acknowledge that God is somehow intimately involved in the constitutive part of me that can’t be put into words.
Have you ever thought about this? Have you considered that God’s handiwork in forming who you are is involved in the “unthought known”[2]? That unusual phrase comes from the work of Christopher Bollas. What he means is that before we can articulate (speak) about ourselves, we have already experienced what it is to be alive, to be human, and to have relationships. That comes with being born and with the attachment to the mother. Bollas describes it like this:
“In a private discourse that can only be developed by mother and child, the language of this relation is the idiom of gesture, gaze and intersubjective utterance.”[3]
“ . . . the infant evolves from experience of the process to articulation of the experience.”[4]
This “unthought known,” this communication before verbalization, includes God. He listens. He “converses” with this inarticulate “innermost being.” In fact, He’s the only one who truly can. Before we were wonderfully woven in the womb, God was in conversation with us. And even though as grown persons we can no longer avail ourselves of this “unthought known” language, He still can. He hasn’t forgotten that being who we are includes an excess beyond what we can describe. “Until the grasp of the word, the infant’s meaning resides primarily within the mother’s psyche-soma.”[5] God is the interloper in this arrangement, but an interloper who has a direct hand in the outcome. Perhaps we need to completely rethink that verse, “visiting the iniquity on the children.”
Topical Index: Bollas, unthought known, unconscious, kilyotāy’, Exodus 34:7, Psalm 119:13-14
[1] Oswalt, J. N. (1999). 983 כלה. R. L. Harris, G. L. Archer Jr., & B. K. Waltke (Eds.), Theological Wordbook of the Old Testament (electronic ed., p. 441). Chicago: Moody Press.
[2] “The body memory conveys memories of our earliest existence. It is a form of knowledge which has yet to be thought, and constitutes part of the unthought known.” Bollas, p. 46.
[3] Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 13.
[4] Ibid., p. 15.
[5] Ibid., p. 35.
