It is the hinge between inner speech and outer speech. Psychology doesn’t happen without working memory.
Yet working memory is elusive. You hear something and speak to it but did your interlocutor mean that or even say it at all?
Let’s define outer speech as speech spoken to another person. Inner speech spoken aloud is still inner speech.
Inner speech informs outer speech and often becomes it. Same thing goes for outer speech. It can be taken in and reshape inner speech in very deep ways.
During the dynamic of two people talking to each other, our working memories are tasked with listening and responding as best we can. TBH, we usually don’t do that very well.
Many mistakes happen during active speech exchanges. I don’t think I need to prove that.
If what is being exchanged has psychological import, to that degree mistakes can be serious or not.
What is weird to me is our entire sense of who we are is built on the insecure fulcrum of our working memories as we speak and listen.
This happened between your mother and father and between them and you and everyone else you have ever spoken with. It’s all very messy, uncertain, filled with potentially extremely grave errors.
This is part of the deep foundation of our psychologies but it is not often mentioned or taken into account nearly enough.
We go for theories about ourselves because they are established outer speech that we can take in and adapt to. To me, that is weak. A very weak way to understand yourself.
