All language, including that of emotionality, assumes meaning within specific contexts and instances of use. Our understanding of emotional experience takes shape via mutually created language games that are intersubjectively situated; we learn spoken meaning in lived contexts. But what happens with patients raised in accommodative or misattuned surrounds, coerced into speaking the scripts of others—alienated from their own mother tongue? Here the therapist may also find themselves estranged, from familiar language worlds of empathic attunement and curiosity, shunted aside in favor of spoken prescriptions or metaphysical 'cures.' 'Talk therapy' is a misnomer; we are attempting nothing less than transforming patients' ways of living, a context lived rather than distantly described or conceptualized.
In this webinar Dr Darren Haber will explore how Wittgenstein revolutionized our understanding of language, underscoring its bewitchment via our intelligence, when words and phrases carry assumed 'truth' through repeated use and familiarity. He will introduce new ways of thinking about the language world of patients, and what hidden assumptions may be at play in what is or is not being said; describe how both participants are vulnerable to reifying bewitchment; and examine how our own theoretical languaging can make us susceptible to becoming frustrated, confused, or otherwise frozen in dyadic processing.
Introduction & Overview
Video Lecture: Language Games & Psychotherapy
Assessment Component
Dr Darren Haber is a psychoanalyst practicing in west Los Angeles. He specializes in treating childhood trauma, addiction (including children/partners of alcoholics) and anxiety/depression. He has published online at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Psyche magazine and the APA blog site. He has appeared numerous times in the journal Psychoanalysis, Self and Context. He frequently guest-teaches psychoanalytical classes and seminars. His book “Circles Without a Center” will be published this spring by Routledge.
