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It was after some hesitation that I accepted to comment on Arild Utaker’s article “Images and words: a reconsideration of the psychic dimension” since it does provide quite a bit of mastication. It is an abstract and difficult article in particular, I guess, for someone who does not know much about Ferdinand Saussure’s ideas on language. Nevertheless, the article caught my interest and, to a large extent, my sympathy and gave rise to associations that I want to briefly elaborate upon.
What I find very important in Utaker’s article is to conceive of meaning and meaningfulness as the basis for psychical life. Utaker refers to Freud’s discovery that the hysterical symptom is meaningful, that it is an expression, an expression of meaning, which has bearing on the whole conceptualization of the psychical as well as the relationship between the physiological and psychical; a bearing that Freud was not always aware of himself. Utaker writes:
The human body is profoundly expressive and receptive. What is expressed – let’s say meaning – is given in the expressions, that is, in gestures, words, images etc. But this is not a combination of something on the one hand mental and on the other hand physiological. It is a combination of a particular kind that we in our intellectual tradition is at loss to understand.
I think it is important to secure this human scientific view of the body in psychoanalysis which we are familiar with in the clinical work in many different ways, such as an enigmatic but nevertheless expressive unity in the psychopathological symptom, as an erogenous body (Freud, 1905), as constituting the original ego-structure in terms of Anzieu’s (1989) “skin-ego” or Ogden’s (1992) “autistic-contiguous position”. However, in today’s psychoanalytic theorizing the importance of meaning as a fundamental ontological notion of the embodied human being is threatened by reductionism and naturalism. For example, the so-called neuropsychoanalysis treats the human body as a nat