1. In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein famously said: “[T]o imagine a language means to imagine a life-form.” 

Let’s observe the life-form that philosopher Stanley Cavell imagines when describing a scene in which a child learns a language; note the complexity he evokes:

When you say “I love my love” the child learns the meaning of the word “love” and what love is. That (what you do) will be love in the child’s world; and if it is mixed with resentment and intimidation, then love is a mixture of resentment and intimidation, and when love is sought that will be sought. When you say “I’ll take you tomorrow, I promise”, the child begins to learn what temporal durations are, and what trust is, and what you do will show what trust is worth. When you say “Put on your sweater”, the child learns what commands are and what authority is, and if giving orders is something that creates anxiety for you, then authorities are anxious, authority itself is uncertain. (The Claim of Reason)

In learning language, the child does not merely learn, as Cavell continues to say, “the pronunciation of sounds, and their grammatical orders, but the ‘form of life’ which makes those sounds the words they are, do what they do.” The meaning of love, promises, commands, and so on, is learned because the child finds itself within a human world of gestures, objects, words, feelings, desires, hopes, beliefs, expectations, and expressions of all kinds, to which it is invited to participate in by others by being addressed as, cared for, and interpreted as, a living being –we accept and respond to the sounds that the child begins to produce as what I said. By this process of (mutual) attunement, where much of its constitutive sensibility is, as Wittgenstein says, “imponderable” (the resentment and intimidation that constitutes my –-concept of—love; the anxiety that constitutes my  –-concept of –-authorities), the child begins to speak and be minded like us: sharing a world with us. We initiate the child into the patterns that constitute what Wittgenstein calls the “weave of our lives.” This is an organic process that requires participation in the complicated crisscross of words and practices of our “language-games.”

Psychoanalysis works with the living grammar of our life-forms. 

2. Once we are able to reflect about language, we find ourselves already (to use Heideggerian jargon) thrown into language. Our capacity to speak “realizes the reflective awareness implicit in using words to say something”, says philosopher Charles Taylor (Philosophical Papers, Volume I: Human Agency and Language). He continues to say that to be able to speak presupposes “this general capacity as background. But to have the general capacity is to possess a language.” The whole of language is a necessary background in the introduction of any of its parts. In talking about language, we are caught in this ‘circle’ where the whole presupposes its parts, and vice-versa. This is another way of saying that speaking and reflective awareness are two sides of the same coin. We never have an external perspective from which to reflect on language. There are only illusions of such externality.

Psychoanalysis attempts to understand our need for these illusions.

3.  Language is a web of relations in which our lives are embedded. A web that is present as a whole in any of its particular realizations. “To speak it to touch a bit of the web, and this is to make the whole resonate”, says Taylor. A word has the possibility of saying something from the moveable position it holds within the complex set of relations in which, through speech, it finds itself with respect to other words, said and unsaid (I believe Cavell’s description of a moment of learning language points in this direction). We can never have rational control over the implications of what we are saying in any particular utterance. We may say more or less than what we mean. We never have a clear oversight of the whole web that is present in that which we speak. So, as Taylor remarks, “our language is always more than we can encompass; it is in a sense inexhaustible.”

Psychoanalysis offers a glimpse into a web of words and intensities, a landscape made from an open totality of life.

4. Speech presupposes a community of speakers. Through speech, we create the possibility of opening up a space to be together, to share our concerns, our intimacy, and our common interests (which doesn’t mean that we necessarily succeed in this; in fact, many times we don’t, but only because the possibility is given). In speaking we address common words which in their place address a shared world that includes fellow humans and things. What we say finds a path that leads us to our neighbors, a path where even our inarticulate meaning may flow through our shared web of words and life to which the other and I belong. Our spoken and unspoken words can find an echo in the other only if something that existed prior to our utterance was able to say something through it; otherwise, our words would have fallen, so to speak, on barren soil. Vis à vis the other, the possibility of speaking without meaning is tested. The space of dialogue is a place for the possibility of revelation entre nous.

Psychoanalysis is a space of community and revelation.

5. Following Taylor, I just spoke of ‘revelation’. The shared web of language reveals a common world; a world to which we are tied in advance through a shared implicit understanding to which my neighbor and I are attuned. In this way, language discloses for articulation and reflective awareness a world that concerns us. It is not only that in language things are articulated as ‘this’ or ‘that’. Language, more primordially, creates, to use Heidegger’s jargon, a clearing where objects (persons, things, etc.) are recognized and articulated as ‘this’ or ‘that’ (by articulating as ‘this’ or ‘that’ I do not only mean the possibility of referring to something but also that of acknowledging and giving shape to a feeling, of putting things in place for discussion, of remembering a forgotten memory, of suddenly finding the mot juste, of empathizing with another’s pain, etc.) 

From this perspective, there is an important sense in which our language expresses our world. Taylor says: “something is expressed when it is embodied in such a way as to be made manifest. (…) Expressions make something manifest in embodying it.” Expressions, such as a painting or the joy or grief in a face, cannot be separated from their media of expression, because only through it do they become manifest. The meanings of these expressions are not inferred or explained by being related to something else (say, an exterior object for the painting, or an interior mental object for the facial expression), but only by another expression. “Of course, a given expression may reveal what it conveys in a partial, or enigmatic, or fragmentary fashion. But (…) however imperfect we cannot contrast them with another, more direct, but non-expressive mode of presentation. What expression manifests can only be manifested in expression.” What is expressed by language cannot be contrasted with another more direct, more fundamental non-expressive mode of presentation. In this sense, the limits of the expressive powers of my language become the limits of the world I am able to embody and be embodied. In this sense: 

-speakers are present in the way they speak;

-speech realizes our integrity;

-speech expresses and crystallizes our position in the world.

Psychoanalysis is an aesthetics and an ethics.

2024