Consciousness, Language, and Self proposes that the human self is innately bilingual. Conscious mind includes two qualitatively distinct mental processes, each of which uses the same formal elements of language differently. The "mother tongue," the language of primordial consciousness, begins in utero and our second language, reflective symbolic thought, begins in infancy.

Michael Robbins is a psychoanalyst and was formerly professor of clinical psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the University of California San Francisco. He is a member of the American and International Psychoanalytic Associations. His previous books include Experiences of Schizophrenia, Conceiving of Personality, and The Primordial Mind in Health and Illness: A Cross-Cultural Perspective.

Preface; Introduction: The lay of the land; Chapter 1 Language and the sense of self Chapter 2: Two conscious mental processes and their languages Chapter 3: Theoretical background of the problem of mental process and consciousness Chapter 4: Fundamental manifestations of primordial consciousness: dreaming and the languages of mother-infant bonding Chapter 5: The relation of mental process and language: The controversy within linguistics Chapter 6: The relationship of language to thought and the sense of self Chapter 7: Belief systems and other everyday phenomenology of primordial consciousness and its language Chapter 8: Primordial consciousness, language, and cultural differences Chapter 9: Emergence of the bilingual sense of self during the attachment phase Chapter 10: What characterizes language aberration? Chapter 11: Language aberration in relation to pathology of early attachment Chapter 12: Clinical methodology and data/Patient essays Chapter 13: Caroline: Schizophrenese Chapter 14: Jane Chapter 15: Charles Chapter 16: Lisabeth Chapter 17: Jacob Chapter 18: Our languages and our selves: Discussion and conclusion