Important thoughts on images and words

Both images and words have their unique materiality that tends to be forgotten or bypassed in our modern times and perhaps in particular in our technology-driven contemporary culture. This oblivion has profound consequences for our self-understanding. The myth about Echo and Narcissus is a story about what happens to a person when he misunderstands the materiality in question, de-symbolises the acoustic and visual signs, and takes them at their face value. He mixes the images conveyed by those signs with his experiences proper, thus tending to loose his touch with the latter.

Freud’s early thoughts on hysteric symptoms and his ideas concerning dreams are crucial in this context, Arild Utaker maintains, because according to Freud dream-images are rooted in bodily processes of the dreamer, in the sense that challenges the dichotomy of mind and body that prevails in our culture. According to Utaker, Freud was not fully aware of the philosophical implications of his approach, however, nor he did draw all the consequences of it he could have done.

Utaker maintains further that in his linguistic theory Ferdinand de Saussure put forward analogous ideas to those of Freud, as he argued that language itself is a psychical phenomenon rooted in sensual and material processes. For de Saussure, a linguistic sign always consists of expression and meaning that, importantly, both differ from each other and always come about together. According to Utaker, this important dialectical idea was too much bypassed in the later reception of his work. Thus both Freud and de Saussure formulated crucial thoughts on the nature of the psychic events as rooted in the bodily processes and as meaningful, ideas that were later not recognised properly.

Both de Saussure and Freud captured in their ways the essential difference between what is psychic and what is not, a difference that is more or less fully avoided by the prevailing theories of mind and body. The key point is, Utaker argues, that psychic