On Psychological Language

[Triton]

Hillman writes: "We need not discard these nomina psychopathology as
the operationalists, existentialists, and radical pragmatists implore.
Nor need they be revised and retranslated into an up-to-date new
language. Rejection or revision is not necessary because the
categories of psychopathology are not merely nomina.


A feild must have a language of its own; in fact, a feild is its
language. It defines itself through its particular language game.
Psychology needed a manner of speaking adequate to the particular
realm that was being discovered. "To work through," "to act out," "to
constellate," and "to integrate," - these inventions of psychotherapy
arose in answer to needs of the psyche to speak of events for which
there were no other terms. We cannot do without the very words which
we have taken to task since they fulfill a function within the psyche
itself. They allow it to present itself by means of a game of symbolic
counters that were coined concurrently with the growth of modern
psychological consciousness. It is not words with which we find fault
but psychology's literalistic relation with them: its beleif that
words refer directly to things. Rather, the words refer to a game
called "psychopathology," and make sense within its fantasy.
Psychiatric language has, for all our scorn, two signal virtues. In
the first place, those men of the nineteenth century were earnestly
concerned with mapping the mind and curing disease. Whether disease of
the psyche exists as they then conceived it, where its limits begin or
end, whether it exists at all -be this as it may- neither their
searching nor their accomplishments should be forgotten. To throw out
the past leaves only new lacuna. Even the residual blunders we inherit
from history are better than no history, that vacuity and illusion of
a clean slate, the new, the now. History undigested only repeats,
sour.


In the second place, these predecessors of ours observed keenly.
Their mistaken language results from a kind of consciousness in which
we each have a share, but their descriptions also belong to the
psyche's phenomenology. Their terms can be saved if we strip them of
their portentous and final diagnostic authority. We must merely clean
them from their mid nineteenth-century context and take them as
precise verbal fantasies mirroring certain details of psychic
behavior." [Myth of Analysis p. 203]


The key words here are obviously - "It is not words with which we
find fault but psychology's literalistic relation with them: its
belief that words refer directly to things." Elsewhere, Hillman
implores people who read his work not to go down the 'Anti-psychiatry'
path as promoted by Laing and Szaz who believed we should completely
throw out, or at least not use psychiatric words at all.