Posted by:
Human
(
)
Date: December 04, 2021 09:18AM
“But by peeling away the onion-skin layers, the inauthentic accretions which smother the core of vital expressive need, psychoanalysis radically undermines the status of the word. Analyst and patient, as they descend the tenebrous spiral staircase of the bruised, stuttering self, hope to bring understanding and a healing measure of acceptance — these, too, are verbal constructs — to bear on the incipience of the speech process, on the shadow-line where the pre and the subconscious surge of the psyche must pass through the narrowing gates of inherited, public linguistic codes. This enforced passage (those Chomskyan ‘constraints’) both ‘maketh man’ and unmans him inasmuch as it deprives his intended meanings of their primal uniqueness, of their correspondence to his sole necessities and imaginings. Only dreams and madness and, partially, the translations of these ‘primes’ into great art and poetry, circumvent this passage. Thus a contradictory motion is implicit in the Freudian proposal (a proposal which I, personally, find no more and no less penetrative, ingenious and metaphorically suggestive than was the faith in demonology and exorcism during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of European history).”
—George Steiner—
—Real Presences—