Language and Psychoanalysis

Dr. Shapiro, in his introductory remarks, reminded the audience that at the last panel devoted to language and psychoanalysis, the chairman, the late Dr. Victor Rosen, had noted that there were three areas of interaction between psychoanalysis and linguistics: the notion of rule-directed behavior, the relationship of language to thought processes, and linguistic relativity. Both areas of inquiry, moreover, are highly deterministic in their approach, as well as being historical and reconstructionist in their efforts to find the origins of linguistic form, and both are analytic and concerned with metatheory.

Dr. Shapiro contrasted the pace of development of psychoanalysis, slow because of the clinical responsibility of its practitioners, and that of linguistics, rapid because as an intellectual discipline the application of controversial theory can be harmly only to the academic ego. He called attention to some of the basic distinctions made in modern linguistic theory that may be relevant to psychoanalysis. In general, modern linguistics is structural in that it studies the underlying organization of language (in contrast to speech or to performance), and synchronic as opposed to diachronic in that it is concerned with tacit structures present at a single time in the history of a language, rather than being primarily concerned with historical change. Today's panel would focus chiefly on the American school of transformational linguistics founded by Chomsky. Proper discussion of the application of linguistic thought to psychoanalysis by Lacan would be reserved for another time. Ultimately, both psychoanalysis and