Some psychodynamics involved in the use of banal phrases

Commonplace phrases, expressions frequent and familiar in the common vernacular, may appear so repetitively in a patient's discourse that they lose significance and so evade analytic scrutiny. These phrases are so trite and shopworn that their function as conveyors of meaning disappears. Speaker and listener quickly habituate to these expressions and automatically exclude them from consideration. Their use illustrates a process whereby a small segment of behavior becomes engorged with frozen meaning and is then maintained by the unwitting collaboration of speaker and listener, both of whom fail to recognize them as meaningful and fail to subject them to scrutiny required of the believer in psychological determinism. I will here give case illustrations of these phenomena and explore such materials for evidence of their importance and significance in the individual's psychic economy. I will compare certain of the mechanisms that support these constructs to those of other psychic phenomena, and will offer some explanation to explain their exemption from analytic scrutiny.