eiseEducation

In this webinar, Dr Darren Haber, PsyD, discusses the notion of language games, Ludwig Wittgenstein's term for our context-dependent ways of employing words and phrases.  Wittgenstein also believed we are fallible in our tendency to become bewitched by language by means of our intelligence—meaning that what both participants say is often less transparent or obvious than they are prone to believe. (For instance the significance and not just the mere naming of affect.)  This can lead to all manner of intersubjective detouring around painful or traumatic affect hiding in plain sight. 

In cases of addiction or other compulsive numbing, language becomes a 'silent partner' in the robbery of subjective meaning from therapeutic dialogue. Patients may be looking for concepts where therapists look for personal meaning—both empty signifiers in such disjunction.  Here language becomes disembodied, enervated, even when taking the form of a 'wall of words'—highlighting the temptation for the enlivening pursuit of compulsive, including on the part of the clinician.  In this way the addictive seeking of answers or 'truths', a sanitizing of therapeutic inquiry, contra subjective vulnerability, manifests before participants' eyes, and reveals the therapist's vulnerability as well. This dilemma belies the 'relatively simple' dialogue many therapists envision—the sharing of feelings—which patients find foreign, emotionality lost in translation, for those who have lived with dissociation, enactment, and aversion as an entrenched mother tongue.