The “linguistic turn” of the early 20th century paved the way for psychoanalysis to establish its theoretical foundations upon a rigorous, semiotic science. Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, and how they create, convey, and decode meaning. To practice psychoanalysis today without understanding structural linguistics is like trying to navigate the ocean without GPS: you might have the old fashion charts, but you’re ignoring the new technology of semiotics that provides a much improved map of the mind.
Currently, psychoanalysis thrives in academia only through structuralist and post-structuralist lenses. It has largely disappeared from biology and psychology departments because the natural sciences have failed to render it theoretically coherent on their terms. Unfortunately, many clinicians are unfamiliar with structural linguistics and therefore miss out on the insights of this powerfully compelling linguistic approach to psychoanalysis.
Freud actually anticipated this linguistic turn which is implicit throughout his work and explicit in some places, such as when he talked about “word presentations” in the conscious mind and “thing presentations” in the unconscious mind. Semiotic theorists such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Lacan and Charles Peirce, showed that our minds are shaped by symbols rather than by a direct apprehension of reality. In fact, those symbols, and the grammatical laws that allow the symbols to function as a shared language, impose a template on reality that constitutes and constrains that reality. Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer said, “Language speaks us, rather than we speak it.” Heidegger called language our “house of being,” meaning that we exist within the constraints and possibilities of the language we inherit. Looked at this way, we can see that language has a repressive function in the sense that it makes us its subjects rather than being a handmaid of our experience, as we naively conceive of it. Repression is an unavoidable effect of becoming a “speaking being.”
When we adopt a language, we gain a shared reality but lose the parts of our experience that words cannot capture. Speech simultaneously reveals and conceals; it imposes a “law and order” on our thoughts that can trap us in a version of reality that we mistake as “true” to our individual experience when it is actually shaped for us by the “Other” of language. Psychoanalysis heals through its “work-around” method where a libidinal illogic unsettles what the patient thinks he or she knows. While other therapies listen to what a patient says, psychoanalysis listens for what the patient is unable to say except through the unsaying of free association. This can be described as a negative dialectic, or a deconstructive method.