Language and Psychoanalysis in the Social Construction of Man

Authors: Charlene Gomes, Emanuele Viera, Fernando Tarvenaro, Junia Alves, Wellington Luiz Oliveira Amaral

This text aims to draw an outline between language, culture and psychoanalysis in the social construction of the subject. Language is one of the oldest branches of systematic research studies. Language is the system through which man communicates his ideas and feelings, whether through speech, writing or other conventional signs. Culture means to cultivate, and comes from the Latin colere. Generically, culture is all that complex that includes knowledge, art, beliefs, law, morals, customs and all the habits and skills acquired by man not only in the family, but as part of a society. In psychoanalysis Lacan traces a path by returning to Freudian texts, making a reading based on the linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson; producing from there a subversion to the analytical field, by stating that the unconscious has a structure of language. This text will address language as a symbolic structure that constitutes the subject, analyzing the cultural milieu and its relations with psychoanalysis.

Keywords: Language. Psychology of the subject. Culture. Psychoanalysis.

Language is a system of signs used by man to communicate his ideas and feelings, whether through speech, writing or other conventional signs.

Everyday, man makes use of verbal and non-verbal language to communicate. Verbal language integrates speech and writing (dialogue, information on the radio, television or press, etc.). All other communication resources such as images, drawings, symbols, music, gestures, tone of voice, etc., are part of non-verbal language.

Body language is a type of non-verbal language, as certain body movements can convey messages and intentions. Within this category there is sign language, a system of gestures and movements whose meaning is fixed by convention, and is used in the communication of people with speech and/or hearing impairments.

Mixed language is the use of verbal and non-verbal language at the same time. For example, a comic strip simultaneously integrates images, symbols and dialogues.

Depending on the social context in which the language is produced, the speaker can use formal language (produced in situations that require the use of standard language, for example, classrooms or work meetings) or informal language (used when there is intimacy between speakers). speakers, resorting to colloquial expressions).

Artificial languages ​​(which are created to serve a specific purpose, for example, mathematical logic or computer science) are also called formal languages. The computer programming language is a formal language that consists of creating specific codes and rules that process instructions for computers.

Language is not static, it is a living element in constant transformation; varies from generation to generation, social group to social group, communication situation to communication situation.

Human language serves not only for communication, but also for expressing feelings such as anger, joy, sadness and practically all other feelings, and this ability is part of the emotional function of language.

Human language is also a cultural manifestation, as it relates to patterns of behavior, beliefs, knowledge, accomplishments, customs that can be transmitted from generation to generation. Man gives meaning to the languages ​​he creates. He creates words, gestures, symbols, ways of expressing his ideas.

Language (idiom) is a form of language, it is one of the instruments of socio-communicative interaction and, like religions, cuisine, clothing, it is part of the culture of peoples.

Culture and Language

John B. Thompson (1988) distinguishes two types of basic usage of the word culture, which he defines as “descriptive conception” and “symbolic conception”.

In the descriptive conception, culture is an interrelated set of beliefs, customs, forms of knowledge, arts, etc., which are acquired by subjects as members of a particular society and which can be studied scientifically. These beliefs and customs form what is characteristic of a given society. In the symbolic conception, science and culture are seen through the use of symbols, which is the distinctive trait of human beings. Culture designates a distinct class of phenomena that depend on the exercise of a mental skill, peculiar to the human species, which is called symbolization. The subjects’ words and gestures are endowed with symbolic meanings. A dynamic relationship is then born between the subject and the culture.

The subject is constituted through social relations, through the appropriation of the meanings of their actions and interrelationships, in the contexts where they are inserted. This appropriate content is the result of a cultural process. In this cultural process, language has a fundamental role as an instrument of communication and transmission of meanings.

For Barkhtin (1990, p. 66) the word and culture are related at the moment of their expressions as the product of social interactions. For the author, language is inseparable from the flow of verbal communication and, therefore, language is transmitted not as a finished product, but as something that is mutually constituted in the flow of verbal communication.

Language is never complete, it is a task, a project that is always in progress and always unfinished. Verbal interaction thus constitutes the fundamental reality of language. Barkhtin also says that communication conditions and social structures are closely linked. Each era and each social group has its own repertoire of forms of speech that works as a mirror that reflects everyday life. The word is the revelation of a space in which the fundamental values ​​of a given society are expressed and confronted. Knowledge is socially constructed, as the mediation of other subjects, through different forms and verbal interactions.

The contributions of language to the way of life in society

Since time immemorial, man, driven by the need for survival, has lived in groups, and for this to be possible, communication was essential. Primitive man needed to pass on information and knowledge acquired between them and their descendants, manage their fears, anguish in the face of all inexplicable adversity for them; leave a mark on the world that transcended the transience of its existence.

Even before language managed to organize itself in an abstract way through writing, man already used art as an instrument of communication and emotional organization, as attested by the thousands of cave drawings found around the world.

Vygotsky, in his theory, proposes that the human being constitutes himself as such in his relationship with the social other. Culture becomes part of human nature in a historical process that, throughout the development of the species and the individual, shapes the psychological functioning of man. For him, access to knowledge takes place through instruments and social symbols. Also according to this author, human language has two basic functions: social communication and generalizing thinking, that is, in addition to allowing communication between people, it simplifies, generalizes, creates conceptual categories and thus facilitates the process of abstraction, generalization and transmission. of knowledge. According to him, verbal thinking is not innate. Concepts are cultural constructions, internalized by the individual throughout his development process and the attributes necessary to define a concept, come from the characteristics of elements found in the real world, and considered relevant by different cultural groups.

John Donne (1572-1631), English poet, is notable for two famous quotations contained in his “Meditation XVII”, published in 1623, where he says (…) “no man is an island”, and further on (…) “by for whom do the bells toll?”

Using poetic language, Donne pays attention to the same point as Lacan: the influence that man receives from the entire context that surrounds him, the influence he exerts in his interrelationship in society and even from what continues after his death. , influencing and being influenced by its existence. Both Lacan and Donne used language to express their perceptions, they spoke of instances that overflow the margins of mere words themselves, although they did so in a very different way regarding the choice of words and the way of organizing them.

A human being, either as an individual or as a member of society, once deprived of language, loses the very thing that most distinguishes and locates him before himself and the world. The case of Helen Keller (1880-1963), writer, philosopher, social activist and world-renowned lecturer, illustrates this condition very well. With a few months to live, she suffered a severe febrile episode (probably caused by scarlet fever), from which she emerged blind and deaf. She grew up a “retarded and socially awkward” child and was almost sent to a sanatorium. From the age of seven, she began to receive the intervention of a caregiver, named Anne Sullivam, (also with severe visual impairment), who taught her sign language. From then on, she was emotionally and intellectually reorganizing herself until she managed to express all her intellectual and humanitarian potential, which otherwise would be lost and disruptive in her internal world. (see the movie “The Miracle of Anne Sullivan”, 1962).

Another very important form of language for life in society is Art. The Swiss-German plastic artist, Paul Klee (1879-1940), put in a few words what for him was the primary function of art: – “Art does not intend to reflect the visible, but to make the invisible visible. ”.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, who had recognized appreciation for the various forms of artistic manifestation, addressed this issue. For him, myth and music have common characteristics, and they would be languages ​​that transcend, each in its own way, the articulated language, and that requires a temporal dimension to manifest itself. The same does not occur with painting, which can do without this prerogative. Still according to Lévi-Strauss, the work of art is a sign of the object and not a literal reproduction (as in Paul Klee); “manifests something that was not immediately given to the perception we have of the object and that is its structure, because the specific characteristic of the language of art is that there is always a very profound homology between the structure of the signified and the structure of the signifier (…) signifying the object, the artist manages to elaborate a structure of meaning that maintains a relationship with the very structure of the object” (Lévi-Strauss, 1968, p. 80, apud NEWS). Even when an artist is…