Empedocles: European Journal for the Philosophy of Communication - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2015

Humans and animals communicate in various non-linguistic modes of communication. This multi-channelled form of communication seems to be characteristic of humans, and involves facial expression, calls/gestures, music and dance, as well as symbolic language; and seems likely to depend, in part, on the psychological mechanisms of projection and projective identification. This article attempts to reflect on the relation between these evolved forms of human communication, both linguistic and non-verbal, in terms of the unconscious as discovered by Freud.

I call Derrida ‘The Sad Rider’ for reasons that will become clear. In his two main roles, as a philosopher and as a historian of ideas, Derrida took up the ladder after him. The younger Wittgenstein called it the philosopher’s duty, and I think Derrida accepted it. He wrote in a way that was unexcerptable and barely quotable, and formulated few propositions. His unteachability was a living instance of what he meant by non-iterability. He hoped to avoid the fate he ascribed to ‘writing’.

Burnout and depression are no strangers to academics. For both students and faculty, these psychological phenomena can plague and even end careers. In this article, it is proposed that burnout and depression among both graduate students and faculty are a primary manifestation of the underlying discourse that is prevalent among many academic institutions. Through the lens of Lacanian discourse theory we will look at the unconscious communication within academia that may be perpetuating the modern dilemma of depression and burnout for both students and professors. Initially, we will look at the concepts of burnout and depression in terms of their clinical manifestations and prevalence. From there, we will consider Lacan’s discourse theory, most notably the concept of the university discourse, and how the unconscious dimension of communication may be effectively propagating psychological distress in academia. Lastly, the article will conclude possible avenues that the academic field can take in order to avoid the pitfalls of such a discourse.

In this article I shall give a brief account of psychoanalytic listening. I shall then consider the ontology of such listening to a session and compare it to the ontology of attending to paintings and poems. Psychoanalysts are interested not merely in what is understood through listening but in the process of listening. I shall proceed to ask how possible it is to represent that process. Finally, I raise some questions about how the capacity to listen psychoanalytically might be taught or passed on.

The message of the present article is, first, that, besides and below the strictly linguistic aspects of communication through language, of which speakers are in principle fully aware, a great deal of knowledge not carried in virtue of the system of the language in question but rather transmitted by the form of the intended message, is imparted to listeners or readers, without either being in the least aware of this happening. For example, listeners quickly register the social status, regional origin or emotional attitude of speakers and they react to those kinds of ‘paralinguistic’ information, mostly totally unawares. When speaker and listener have a positive attitude with regard to each other, the reaction consists, among other things, in mutual alignment or accommodation of pronunciation features, lexical selections and style of speaking. When the mutual attitude is negative, the opposite happens: speakers accentuate their differences. Then, when this happens not between individual interlocutors but between groups of speakers, such accommodation or divergence phenomena may lead to language change. The main theoretical question raised, but not answered, in this article is how and at what point forms of behaviour, including linguistic behaviour, achieve the status of being ‘standard’ or ‘accepted’ in any given community and what it means to say that they are ‘standard’ or ‘accepted’. It is argued that frequency of occurrence is not the main explanatory factor, and that a causal explanation is to be sought rather in the, often unconscious, attitudes of individuals, in particular their desire or need to be integrated members of a community or social group, thus ensuring their safety and asserting their group identity. The question thus belongs to the province of social psychology. Qualms about analyses of this kind being ‘unscientific’ dissipate when it is realized that consciousness phenomena are part of the real world and must therefore be considered to be valid objects of scientific theory formation. Like so many other ill-understood elements in scientific theories, consciousness, though itself unexplained, can be given a place in causal chains of events.

This piece lists, in an evocative way, how the author hopes that psychoanalysis may contribute to liberation.

In this article I address how one might develop states of freedom in analysis and in the analyst from the tangles of unconsciousness that exist in one’s unconscious mind, within the society that trained one, and from the unspoken depths of our European culture. How can one think about trauma in the individual without thinking of it in generational terms? In a similar way the cultural heritage that formed the backdrop to the development of psychoanalysis from within the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its aftermath has its own value transmitting unconscious imprints on analytic societies. What are the interfaces between personal and historical trauma, and in particular the interface with unconscious processes? What we can grasp of the innermost life of the patient and of the world he or she lives in, and by which he or she is so profoundly affected, is also a part of a broader history and specific culture. Totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century have, of course, had a massive impact on Europe, including analytic societies, which I will argue is ongoing. How can the mind take a measure of history, when history will submit neither to the reason of the world nor to the mind that confronts it?