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Freudian Psychology
Psychic Life and the Power of Words
What is the relationship between words we use and our material circumstances?
Posted April 2, 2021 Reviewed by Davia Sills
This post was co-authored with the feminist philosopher Jen Izaakson (Ph.D. candidate).
When Sigmund Freud invented the "talking cure" over a century ago, it became clear that something in the process of speaking about our feelings could resolve internal suffering. The method of talking freely (free association), articulating our innermost fears or desires, tended towards not just mental betterment, but even showed a capacity to cure somatic illnesses (what we might today call "psychosomatic," but at the time was simply called "hysteria").
When Freud was sacked and became unemployable, his medical reputation destroyed for lecturing on male hysteria (until that point, for three millennia, hysteria had been considered a woman-only ailment), he had the time to invent psychoanalysis, and the "talking cure" was born. Except, somewhat paradoxically, the object of psychoanalysis is that which cannot be said, that which exists in transference (how the patient feels about the analyst), counter-transference (how the analyst feels about the patient), re-enactments, and a whole host of other things that represent unconscious thoughts and feelings that cannot be transmitted into language.
Language, therefore, is not the whole story of psychic life or the material world. (Nietzsche says in Twilight of the Idols: “That for which we find words is something already dead in our hearts. There is always a kind of contempt in the act of speaking.”) But where does that leave words?
When we speak and a thought becomes "symbolized," there is a transformative process at stake. Words are, if chosen well, not only powerful but highly affecting. We frame and color the world around us by speaking out loud our thoughts, gain the understanding of others if we can convince at the level of speech, and can change our own internal states or influence the emotional states of others through mere conversation.
By poorly choosing words, we risk our relationships or opportunities because we all implicitly understand at a basic level that when we articulate one thing or another, we are simultaneously articulating ourselves and representing who we are. Words in and of themselves are not power, but the ability to use words well is a kind of power. Yet, there are limits to that.
Freud himself was acutely aware of the limits of what the "talking cure" could address. An excellent example of this was the case of Dora, where Freud infamously discovered Dora was not in love with Herr (Mr.) K as everyone thought, but his wife Frau (Mrs.) K, and had been for many years. Prior to this, Dora’s mother had been recommended for treatment. Freud rejected Dora’s mother for analysis, stating she had “housewives’ psychosis” due to spending all her time stuck indoors, occupied only with household matters, and this was obviously why she was thoroughly depressed (as anyone in her situation might be).
Psychoanalysis, therefore, is the method of explaining that which is socially or politically without explanation, that which is a mystery with no obvious material basis. Words, therefore, from the outset of Freudian thought, do not trump material circumstance. That is a sentiment that was uncontroversial until very recently.
Today, we are living with the legacy of the French "linguistic turn" that effectively saw magical, mythopoetic attributes awarded to words. This legacy is partly due to Jacques Lacan, a follower of Freud, who elaborated his theories through his own re-conceiving of the unconscious as "structured like a language." Lacan went on to create symbolic systems to help us understand the world philosophically, making statements such as "there is no such thing as woman" (il n'y a pas La femme); though this was not meant literally, but rather referred to how women are conceived of within a world dominated by men. Lacan, amongst other thinkers like Derrida and Foucault, went on to influence the young Judith Butler during the 1980s.
Endowing language with magical properties is not the preserve of Butler alone, but she is perhaps uniquely responsible for the confluence between language and identity, primarily through her reconstruction of J.L. Austin’s concept of "performativity" (a theory of language that Butler has now disavowed, telling the New York Times in 2019, “I am no longer sure what counts as performative”). In any case, today, in a world where most young people expect to have lower prospects than their parents and have less chance to own property than generations before them, a reliance on language to subjectively reproduce themselves is no surprise.
Online cultural spaces have become home to the mass proliferation of identities and new linguistic labels for who we are and what we believe. This digital world of words has led to real-life policy changes, with concrete ramifications for people far beyond the listicles of Tumblr. More and more, we are facing a competition of language versus materialism, not in terms of academic tradition (linguistics versus historical materialism), but in ways that cast language as constituting the fabric of reality itself. How one feels becomes equivalent to what one is, and there is less and less of a difference between putative truth claims about the external world and one’s inner sensorium.
Consider further problems with this lexico-materialist thesis. In the contemporary philosophy of language, the dominant "externalist" position in the field maintains that words like water and house and book exhibit a direct referential relationship to something in the mind-independent world. The idea is that words successfully pick out something in material reality.
But this position does not survive basic scrutiny: Liverpool can be "fun" and "polluted" and can be burned down and rebuilt on the opposite side of the river Mersey, yet still be called Liverpool. The city does not so much have a function as it is a function; or, it is a way of physically realizing (in whatever form or shape it takes) a particular functional notion. Any polity concept, like a city, has an intricate constellation of polysemous senses. The "meaning" of any city seems to go beyond its skyscrapers, culture, populace, political ideology, location, and so forth.
The same is even true of much less complex objects, like a lunch, which can be "delicious" but also "delayed" at the same time, with no object in the external world being able to simultaneously host these properties. If John says to Mary, “Lunch was delicious but took forever,” John is not committed to the belief that there are things in the world that are simultaneously abstract and concrete. Rather, he is using language to generate in Mary particular inferences, involving reference to mind-internal representations that can be imposed on sensory data. If Mary then says to John, “The school with large windows starts at 9 a.m. and has a strict headmaster and unruly students,” she is not committed to any ontological claims about her words picking out some complex entity in the world which satisfies the conditions of being an event, a physical artifact, an organization, and a populace all at once.
Think of other relatively trivial cases which serve to expose the "externalist" thesis as baseless: Take the sentence, “John read and then burned every book in the library.” John burned more books than he read if the library contained multiple copies of certain books. As such, the phrase “every book” does not pick out an invariant quantity (i.e., John reads 6,000 books but burns 8,000). This leads to a quantification paradox, unable to be accommodated through any traditional model of direct reference.
Ignoring many important historical details, we can roughly summarize that 19th-century philologists stressed the importance of sounds; by the 1920s, Otto Jespersen shifted attention to the written word; in the 1950s, Noam Chomsky moved the study of language towards abstract mental structures, beyond any specific form of input modality. By the 1970s, Tarskian systems of "semantics" and truth conditions had been developed to a sufficient degree of sophistication, but a false conclusion was made: Natural language has meaning; meaning is a system of semantics; semantics can be represented via Tarskian models; therefore, the semantics of the natural language are Tarskian. While one can readily model a system of semantics via Tarski-style truth conditions, it does not follow that the meanings we derive from natural language expressions (and not formal language expressions) follow the same "externalist" system of reference, whereby one symbol denotes some other entity.
We can, of course, use words to refer to things in the world, but this is an action of an individual (“Look at that car”), not an inherent property of language. Many other examples, from Heraclitus’s river paradox to the Ship of Theseus paradox, reveal that words denote mind-internal conceptual structures used for interpreting experience and are simply not in the business of picking out things in the world. Only natural kind terms, like H2O (and not water, which is not the same), developed within the context of an explicit naturalistic theory, can be used (we hope, at least) to successfully refer to external entities and processes. We essentially use words as hypotheses about particular states, qualities, and objects in the world—but the world itself remains, as ever, at a necessary distance.
Turning away from materialism can often have extremely productive, creative outcomes for exploring new, possible conceptual spaces—but this move can also have some problematic effects, at times creating conflicts between material reality and pronouncements of identity claims.
Words about ourselves do not lend themselves to absolutes. Expressing ourselves is necessarily a messy business, our feelings often ambivalent. Language must be able to capture that ambiguity. By transforming words into articles of faith, we render language concrete, absolute, and literal. Without room for ambivalence, there can be no doubt, and without doubt, we can no longer have speculation or room for discussion.
More and more, we use language to reclaim some sense of power. We use words as psychic crutches to support a devastated psycho-social fabric, leading to a kind of hyper-inflation of linguistic power. “I fear those big words”—Stephen Daedalus tells us in Ulysses—“that make us so unhappy.” One can perfectly understand why.
