Symptom, Symbol, and the Other of Language: A Jungian Interpretation of the Linguistic Turn (Research in Analytical Psychology and Jungian Studies) by Bret Alderman

Author:Bret Alderman [Alderman, Bret]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781317405870
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2015-12-22T02:00:00+00:00

Acknowledging affinities: speaking to, with, and about non-human others

In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, Abram (1996) puts forth a vision of language in which word and world once participated in the most intimate of relationships, but have since been severed from one another: Pictographs, from which the modern alphabet evolved, echoed in their form the sensible entities for which they stood; to write of an ox was to draw a simple picture of an ox. The animal, and the sign that represented it, were intimately related; pictographs referred the reader to a living being that could be immediately perceived by the senses. However, with the advent of the alphabet, this direct relationship between word and world was diminished. An intimacy was lost. An estrangement began. Unlike a pictograph, an individual letter does not so directly portray any sensible phenomena in the world, except perhaps the sound that it represents. Though a limited number of consonants reflected elements of nature, like the flight pattern of cranes, increasingly this reflection has faded; an X does not draw our attention to any object or living being existing in the world that we co-inhabit. Rather, it draws attention to itself, and the relationship it has to other letters in a given word.

Although this shift is perhaps subtle, the consequences are profound. On Abram’s telling, with the dawn of the alphabet, a schism between word and world begins, and a concomitant growing muteness of the natural world. As the human voice begins to articulate itself by way of words formed in letters, “the other animals, the plants, and the natural elements—sun, moon, stars, waves—are beginning to lose their own voices” (Abram, 1996, p. 101). No longer can we hear the whispering brook warn of coming danger. No longer can we read omens in the clouds, or hear the query in a crow’s caw. The sensitive observer who sees animals in the cumuliform and stratiform sky sees only a curiosity. The ancient hermeneutic endeavor of reading nature’s vicissitudes has gradually been replaced by a world in which nature seems to have nothing to say, a world that signifies nothing, and is therefore insignificant. Thus the divorce that Abram describes is twofold; as human language extricates itself from the world of the senses, nature’s language grows mute to human ears. Language slowly becomes more and more an exclusively human affair. I say slowly, for the tale of the divorce of word and world is a long one. The abstraction of language from its sensuous surround takes us from the original formation of a pictographic language by Phoenician traders, to the innovation of the aleph-beth by Hebrew scribes, to the adaptation of this aleph-beth by the Greeks and the formation of the Western alphabet, to the recognition of language as a formal system of signs in the semiotics of Saussure.

Saussure’s semiotics is important for Abram’s account because it inaugurates an understanding of linguistic meaning as a product of differences within a system of language; words possess

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