Experience of language in Daseinsanalysis

28/01/2015 12:42

[Proposed by Danielle Pisani de Freitas (ABD - Brazilian Association of Daseinsanalysis)]

 The practice of Daseinsanalyse, being characterized as phenomenological-hermeneutical, presupposes language. Certainly, the therapeutic process of Daseinsanalyse drives us into a path in which we experience language in a peculiar way. Quoting Thanasis words, “a language in which it could be held an authentic meeting and dialogue with the other”. According to João Augusto Pompéia (one of the founders of Brazilian Association of Daseinsanalysis), the language of poiesis is that which is more fertile for the daseinsanalytic encounter. It is through the language of poiesis that the therapist and the patient should search for the significant truths, that which could free the patient for the dedication to the authentic meanings of being coming towards his existence. 

My question would be how do we recognize, understand, and experience the phenomenon of language as it happens in the therapeutic sessions? How could we comprehend, via a phenomenological approach, the language of poiesis happening in the Daseinsanalytical encounter? It is fact that for Heidegger the phenomenon of language was an important and deeply discussed issue in his classes and writings. May we be inspired by these ontic-ontological reflections while thinking about the peculiar way language is experienced during the process of Daseinsanalytical therapy? 

 

 



Thanasis Georgas (Hellenic Society of Daseinsanalysis) 

     The saying of the poet lets things be. In its listening-speaking of Saying, the poetic word brings things into their being, gathers their world, and places us within it. It is the wonder of a world, its shining in unconcealment, that the poetic word speaks.

    Also, the therapeutic encounter is primarily a linguistic relationship. The "talking cure" is a relating which transpires in and through language. The phenomenon to which both therapist and client are devoted is the client's discourse, not its conversational or functionally informative dimension but its hidden or latent quality. What has to be cared for is Dasein's own most self, its uncanny being-in-the-world which is covered-up in its everydayness. (The strangeness of human existing, its uncanniness, is what makes us, as Sophocles' chorus in Antigone says, "the strangest of the strange"). The uncanny is not simply a subspecies of the familiar --something once familiar which has been repressed but resurfaces. The familiar carries the uncanny within it; the uncanny is the secret concealed within the canny (Das Unheimliche ist die Geheimnis des Heimlichen).   Psychotherapy can then be identified as a site in which the logos of the psyche, a logos which responds to the appropriative Saying of the human uncanny, is spoken.

    So, the site of psychotherapy (the uncanny logos of the psyche) could be located in the neighborhood of poetry. The logos of the psyche belongs with poetry as different but equally primordial human hearings of the same appeal of Being.