LANGUAGE for THOSE WHO HAVE NOTHING Mikhail Bakhtin and the Landscape of Psychiatry Peter Good
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Language for Those Who Have Nothing Mikhail Bakhtin and the Landscape of Psychiatry COGNITION AND LANGUAGE A Series in Psycholinguistics Series Editor: R. W. RIEBER Recent Volumes in this Series: AMERICAN AND CHINESE PERCEPTIONS AND BELIEF SYSTEMS: A People’s Republic of China-Taiwanese Comparison Lorand B. Szalay, Jean B. Strohl, Liu Fu, and Pen-Shui Lao THE COLLECTED WORKS OF L. S. VYGOTSKY Volume 1: Problems of General Psychology Volume 2: The Fundamentals of Defectology (Abnormal Psychology and Learning Disabilities) Volume 3: Problems of the Theory and History of Psychology Volume 4: The History of the Development of Higher Mental Functions Volume 5: Child Psychology Volume 6: Scientific Legacy EXPERIMENTAL SLIPS AND HUMAN ERROR: Exploring the Architecture of Volition Edited by Bernard J. Baars LANGUAGE FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOTHING Mikhail Bakhtin and the Landscape of Psychiatry Peter Good LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, AND THE BRAIN Tatyana B. Glezerman and Victoria I. Balkoski PSYCHOENVIRONMENTAL FORCES IN SUBSTANCE ABUSE PREVENTION Lorand B. Szalay, Jean Bryson Strohl, and Kathleen T. Doherty THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY OF LANGUAGE AND COGNITION Robert W. Rieber and Harold J. Vetter TIME, WILL, AND MENTAL PROCESS Jason W. Brown VYGOTSKY’S PSYCHOLOGY-PHILOSOPHY: A Metaphor for Language Theory and Learning Dorothy Robbins A Continuation Order Plan is available for this series. A continuation order will bring delivery of each new volume immediately upon publication. Volumes are billed only upon actual shipment. For further information please contact the publisher. Language for Those Who Have Nothing Mikhail Bakhtin and the Landscape of Psychiatry Peter Good Kluwer Academic Publishers New York, Boston, Dordrecht, London, Moscow 0-306-47198-1 0-306-46502-7 ' ! " # $ % & ' % '& ' ' # & ( ) & * + %,,- - . %,,-- - For Kit Abbreviations AA Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Art and Answerability’, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophica Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Liapunov V. and Brostrom K., ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1990. AH Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity’, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Liapunov V. and Brostrom K., ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1990. CMF Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘The Problem of Content, Material and Form in Verbal Artistic Creation’, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Liapunov V. and Brostrom K., ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1990. DiN Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Discourse in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981. EN Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Epic and Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981. FM P. M. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, trans. Wehrle A. J., Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1985. FR V. N. Volosinov, Freudianism: A Marxist Critique, trans. Titunik, I.R., New York, Academic Press, 1976. vii viii Abbreviations FTC Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 198 1. MPL V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Matejka L. and Titunik I.R., Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1986. PDP Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems ofDostoevsky's Poetics, trans. and ed. by Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984. PND Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, in The Dialogic Inzagination: Four Essays by M.M. Bakhtin, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, ed. Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1981. RAHW Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Iswolsky H., Bloomington, IN., Indiana University Press, 1984. SG Mikhail Bakhtin, Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. McGee V., ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1986. TPA Mikhail Bakhtin, Toward a Philosophy of the Act, trans. Liapunov, V., eds. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1993. TRDB Mikhail Bakhtin, ‘Towards a Reworking of the Dostoevsky book’, Appendix 11 in Problems ofDostoevsky's Poetics, trans. and ed. by Caryl Emerson, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Preface For Mikhail Bakhtin, language is the social dynamic occupying the space between separate consciousnesses. There can be no ‘neutral’ words. Language is everywhere inlaid with intentions and accents. To gain meaning, words must first be infused with life by being expressed through a living consciousness. Once expressed they must then struggle for recognition in the social space shared by other living words. Every utterance becomes an expression of meaning given through a living body. And because every utterance is social it is invested by the anticipation of the other’s response. And herein lies the basis of Bakhtin’s concept of Dialogue. For him, every single utterance, whether a thought, a written text, or a simple everyday salutation is a voice addressed to another. Through this intimate social connection the utterance belongs not only to the speaker but to the interlocutor as well. By combining addressivity and anticipation both speakers come to take on a shared responsibility for meaning. A mutual sense of meaning is created in the space formed by two separate consciousnesses. Understood this way, language becomes a series of unrepeatable social encounters. Each utterance is made unique by the measure of its own social space. No single utterance can ever be repeated because the social conditions of every interaction change from moment to moment. Such is the complexity of human dialogue. Its complexity is evident when we consider that all bodies are able to call upon a wide range of voices that are judged to be appropriate to a particular social encounter. Accordingly, voices - because they are living social forces - are stratified across the full social spectrum. From the way a voice is employed it is relatively easy to determine how it gives standing to a body on a landscape. Those voices that cluster around the central and the more powerful regions come to assume the ix x Language For Those Who Have Nothing mantle of the official voice and are the focus by which other voices are measured against. History suggests that when one voice presides over this central zone, the less it is willing to consider the response of other voices, Higher languages, it will be seen, are given to discussion only within the orbit of their own guarded registers even though other voices could be more adequate to the task. I confess I have long been frustrated with the nature of dialogue in psychiatry. I have been suspicious of the powerful rhythms that run through psychiatry’s official utterances. I have felt that this is a voice addressed more to shoring up its own standing rather than expressing a willingness to engage with its own multi-levelled landscape of voices. My vision of psychiatry has been one of a landscape dotted with various sites of official voices in constant competition for an ever-elusive security of standing. Different professions and historically determined tiers of hierarchies joust with one another for the ownership of mental illness. Committed to this struggle, these professional voices make strenuous efforts to mimic the same rhythms of the official voice in order to gain recognition. From Bakhtin, I was made to realise that both the questions and the answers asked in psychiatry belong to the same voice. There is scant evidence to suggest any open dialogue between official and unofficial voices. Yet, wherever I wandered on the wards or in the canteens, the voices of humour, of unofficial terminology, of parody, and of folk belief appeared to be thriving. I believe that many of these voices describe a reality that official voices cannot always explain. Jokes voice a constant commentary on the relationship between practitioners and patients. Unofficial utterances speak of throwing a wobbly or of someone being high. Yet these are voices that are accurately descriptive of mental states and are immediately understood by everyone. Bakhtin is insistent that official and unofficial languages are interdependent upon each other. One voice cannot exist alone because all voices possess form-shaping qualities upon the other. Thus, a central premise runs through this book: In every region of the psychiatric landscape, official ends are being met by unofficial means. The gaps in official knowledge, and there are many, are being filled-in with unofficial voices. Psychiatry is actively dependent upon unofficial meanings to an extent that it is unwilling to concede. This book draws heavily upon Bakhtin’s sense of polyphony in order to devise a means of navigation. I will argue that to engage with the voices that play on this landscape requires more than a simple intellectual shift. So often, practitioners find themselves entering the clinic on a purely intellectual level. Polyphony demands a physical change to one’s own bodily standing. Words sometimes need different bodies in order to live and Preface xi breathe. To travel polyphonically means that the traveller must be prepared to engage their own body in a dialogue. My initial attraction to Mikhail Bakhtin began when I learned that he was only one of a very few independent thinkers who survived the atrocities of the Soviet experiment. Many lesser minds than his were simply put up against a wall and shot. True, he did suffer a period of exile, but I was intrigued to discover what qualities Bakhtin possessed that were sufficient to ensure he reached his eightieth year. I was to find that a combination of passion and humility enabled him to conduct a specific form of dialogue with others. Yet, added to these otherwise admirable qualities, came the knowledge of his capacity for deception.