created by More_Bid_2197 on 16/01/2025 at 15:16 UTC
51 upvotes, 16 top-level comments (showing 16)
It is quite accepted in our culture that going to a psychologist and talking about your problems is therapeutic. At the same time, many people question the idea of language transmitting truth, the idea of truth, the idea that communication is possible. Would healing through speech be a utopia? Like the idea that it would be possible to reach the truth through language ?
Comment by pluralofjackinthebox at 16/01/2025 at 15:41 UTC
95 upvotes, 1 direct replies
The problematic nature of language is all the more reason for it to be an object of therapeutic concern!
Lacan famously states that the truth of psychoanalysis is structured like a fiction. What does this mean? Well, one thing provided by a talking cure is it allows us to weave together the events and traumas and desires from our lives into a coherent story we can tell about ourselves, so we can make sense of ourselves and others.
And I would add that psychotherapy is ultimately a practice concerned with helping people live better lives, not with uncovering unshakable truths: there is a lot of empirical evidence that talk therapy *works* (though not much evidence than any particular theoretical school works better than others.) Therapy doesn’t need to uncover truth to work — what it does best is help us understand our own relationship to language, how language relates to our desires and our problems. It’s not about discovering truth but about building a relationship with ourselves through language.
Comment by turtleben248 at 16/01/2025 at 15:31 UTC
26 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Jacqueline Rose might be the best writer on this. The basic idea is that you begin with a different conception of truth. That there is no absolute truth, basically. I think this is basically like a feminist epistemology applied to Freud
Therapy doesn't need to lead to absolute truths, I think it's more like the patient accepts their partial truths, and the partiality of those truths.
Comment by JeffieSandBags at 16/01/2025 at 16:00 UTC*
15 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I think truth and healing are very different in terms of clinical psychotherapy. "Talk-therapy" is only partly about talking. A good amount of the healing or growth in therapy happens around the conversations, not necessarily from them. Maybe ad much as 70% of client outcomes depend on the relation between client and therapist. Moreover, objective truth, or even teuth at all is not the aim, instead understanding, acceptamce, and meaning are primary (usually). Psychoanalytic and psychiatric theories and approaches are not the most useful ways of conceptualizing most therapeutic conversations and how the create openings for change. They are useful, but clinically I think we get a lot farther with other approaches. I mention that so you can take or leave my opinion, I started being a therapist heavily Lacanian in orientation and found it overly complex and unwieldy in session, in conversation with clients.
What got me out of that funk, and what I suggest you check out is, Narrative Therapy. Michael White's book "Maps of Narrative" practice is a great introduction, and the culmination of his work. Building on Foucault, Bruner, and some mainstays in psychology (like Vygotsky), White articulates a clear and accessible version of talk therapy that is based in critical theory and opens a space for change theough an interrogation of a person's inner language use. The aim is, generally, to address the ways in which language leads to subjectification for the client
For example, the first step in therapy is often to externalize the problem linguistically (i.e., saying "the depression slows me down" rather than "I'm depressed and slow." The book discusses how this change in language can lead to behavioral amd exoeriential change for the client.
Edit: Eugene Gendlin is another person that might help. The technique Focusing is not popular outside some circles, but it embraces the limitations of language and works toward intuitive understandings in the client. They cannot be described, but are experienced productively through Focusing, or setting at right and rhe edge of what language van convey and instead of cognitively pushing language beyond its capacity, the aim is to experience the problem and let "the body" arrive at an answer. Then with the therapist we can make sense of what intuition/the body realized and explore what shifts as a result.
Comment by throwRA454778 at 16/01/2025 at 15:31 UTC*
22 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Had a class on psychoanalysis yesterday, this topic came up. A few things to consider. One is that the field of psychiatry has somewhat moved into chemistry/drug remedies which shifted things away from more language based therapies first from psychoanalysis and next from cognitive science (cbt). People have become discontented with this direction as of late and there is some return to talk therapy.
When it comes to language remember that, in general, humans are only the cognitive creatures that they are because of it. Without language we are basically prehistorical hominids. When it comes to how exactly language is utilized to reveal truths it really depends on the philosophy taken in the approach. To a psychoanalyst language is a bridge to the subconscious, it can draw subconscious ideas into the conscious and tackle the ‘haunted mansion’ that is our minds. To a cognitive scientist language is more of a computational tool. You might use it as a distraction from another thought or activity, or you might use an activity as a distraction from certain language. Whatever the case cbt is not about finding truth so much as it is about rewiring minds to facilitate new potential.
In psychology I haven’t seen language described as utopian although I have seen different methodologies prescribe different utility to its role in therapy. There is a larger philosophical idea, however, about whether language is a tool to interpret truth in the universe. This is maybe an even wider and more abstract conversation and it depends often on specific notions of objectivity, universality, and metaphysics.
Comment by AbjectJouissance at 16/01/2025 at 22:53 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This is a good question. You might be interested in the debate between Barbara Cassin and Alain Badiou in *There Is No Sexual Relation: Two Essays On Lacan*. Cassin is an anti-philosopher who rescues sophistry (or sophistics), emphasising the untranslatability between languages, the inability of languages to express any universal truth, etc. On the other hand, Badiou is a neo-Platonism who believes universal truths can be 'half-said' through mathemes and formulas (what we might call mathematical Platonism).
The question here is basically: can language say anything about the truth? In my own opinion, drawing from Žižek (who writes about this debate in *Less Than Nothing*, Cassin is right to say that there is no external standard to truth onto which language can anchor itself. But there *is* a truth immanent to language itself. This truth is located in the "gaps" or cracks of language, the point which the discourse itself cannot articulate, it is the "traumatic void" of the Real or objet a. The discursive field is structured and distorted by this traumatic kernel, and so we can apprehend the truth by looking at the symptoms, contradictions or impasses which arise from language itself.
Comment by Korva666 at 16/01/2025 at 15:40 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I am not an expert, but as far as I know, at least psychoanalysis acknowledges that talk therapy is not about discovering any underlying truth of yourself. In analysis you give your unconscious thoughts conscious form by using language. The analyst helps you create, not discover.
Comment by Born_Committee_6184 at 16/01/2025 at 16:40 UTC*
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
It’s worth saying that therapy can help create an ideal speech situation. Cf. Habermas. Having said this, I was trained and practiced as a strategic family therapist. For this school, speech is always ideological. The therapist uses a process like dialectics to let the family move to less problematic interactions. The Bologna School allied with this school was consciously Marxist. I think talk therapy can work too.
Comment by Stunning_Wonder6650 at 16/01/2025 at 21:49 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This is why somatic psychology exists. Somatic psychology is very effective with trauma because trauma is pre-verbal and lives in the present through the nervous system. So somatic psychology subverts talk therapy by directly addressing the body.
Comment by boraxo808 at 17/01/2025 at 16:43 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The newest neurobiology research shows that therapeutic relationships are not as much about content, (language) as they are about the relationship itself. Right brain to right brain limbic intersubjectivity allows the therapist to help restructure the clients orbito frontal connections in the brain that are not myelinated in infancy due to Problems in the dyadic affect regulation relationship with the primary caregiver. This is why studies show little difference in efficacy between applied theories. The actual change occurs in the pre symbolic right hemisphere/limbic/HPA axis. Left brain (language) work like CBT and other practices like narrative therapy etc. tangentially help because of the relationship between client and therapist.. people who are caught up in left brain thinking styles like to blah blah blah about philosophy and language etc but it’s emotional experience that allows people to act rationally in the world… not (thinking) per se.. the left hemisphere is not directly wired to the limbic system and body, most people talking about this topic in this thread probably perceive themselves as disembodied minds. So this means they will have left brain centric viewpoints. This is all newer neurobiology from the past 20 years and it doesn’t seem like critical theory has integrated this type of “critique”.. preferring to look at “ideas” from lacan, Derrida, deluze and other writers who are stuck in left brain circular “thinking”. Good luck.
Comment by thirdarcana at 16/01/2025 at 17:48 UTC
10 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The "talking cure" is really not a technical psychological term, it's more like how my grandpa called psychoanalysis, but it's a fundamental misunderstanding of the psychotherapeutic process to think it's limited to what can be put into words. Putting CBT aside (and possibly in a trash can), most psychotherapies that make sense - psychoanalysis, gestalt, constructivism, existentialism - really work where language fails.
In my mind, a good therapist shares this suspicion of language. It's where a good therapist starts.
Comment by dropthedrip at 16/01/2025 at 15:35 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
While I don’t have an answer for your question in terms of talk therapy, I do think that the limitations of language and the question of utopia are good ones. One response to the general post-structuralist trend of linguistic suspicion you mentioned would be Agamben’s work on Benjamin, specifically the first part of ‘Potentialities’. He deals specifically with Benjamin’s idea of a language of historical redemption, a utopic goal. Briefly, the question of pure presence and a challenge to the inner workings of the sign are ways to consider the limitations and offerings of language.
Comment by SupermarketOk6829 at 17/01/2025 at 05:25 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Ernst Becker, in 1960s itself, put into doubt the potential of psychotherapy as a practice (replacing spirtiualist/religious figures). Marxists and political psychological thinkers within psychoanalysis opposed it and felt that it undermined its true potential which was to have agency in changing institutional structures.
Comment by hockiklocki at 16/01/2025 at 22:56 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Becoming suspicious of language is the direct result of Freudian ideas making their way into philosophy. So in that sense it's not ridiculous, it's in fact crucial. But what is called psychology today and what it was 100 years ago are two completely different things.
Today psychology became another tool of the totalitarian state and totalitarian market economy. Receiving actual therapy is rare, mostly you get abused and exploited. But you can do it on your own, as Freud intended. And you should do it. You should observe your won language as a foreign object, it's part of becoming an actual human being - taking hold of your own language, vocabulary, and most importantly semantics. You have to learn about rebuilding definitions from scratch if you want to achieve any clarity on any topic. Being a vessel for other peoples ideas and acolyte of this or that ideology is as far as one can stray from honest philosophy. You can not be a philosopher without becoming an individual first, and Freudian method is still the only one I know to achieve that, because unlike all the fake copycats that came after him (I'm looking at you Young) it does not pre-scribe any ideology (fundamental structure of self-analysis).
Basically, becoming your own psychiatrist is how you become human. Now that I (maybe) built up some enthusiasm, I certainly would not like to spoil it with the hints about fundamental limitations of not so much the method, but human intellect itself, that may, often painfully, reveal themselves among other insigts.
Comment by whickwithy at 17/01/2025 at 13:43 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The Tao is also very suspicious of words and descriptions. They are not the same as the thing itself.
Comment by Gloomy_Specific_9680 at 16/01/2025 at 18:45 UTC
1 upvotes, 2 direct replies
You know that the idea of "communication not being possible" literally comes from Lacan, right?
Comment by Mousse-Working at 16/01/2025 at 16:19 UTC
-1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
there is no truth, utopias are still limits to get close to… your question isnt asking much of anything