Therapy Toronto Psychotherapy Definitions

Language & Being

Our great-grandparents once remarked "Language speaks the man".

Within therapy there is much attention to the words, phrases and idioms that are used in the work.

Freud's early work Jokes and their Relationship to the Unconscious was an amusing but thoughtful discussion of the way in which humour displaces serious feelings.

The phrase 'Freudian slip' describes the way in which the Id or Unconscious provokes the truth to slip out despite the pressure of civilized social repressions.

More recently, philosophers have paid attention to the way in which the way we think is an outcome of our shared and personal idioms.

Some therapists believe that the whole purport and goal of therapy is to create and 'own' a personal narrative.

Martin Heidegger took the view that our own personal reality was largely the artifact and result of the way in whih we employ language, or perhaps are mediated by words themselves.

He would later write "Language is the shepherd of Being."

That has been taken to mean that we exist within the language worlds that are native to us and created by our sense of the Logos.

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