Language occupies a contested and generative position across the depth-psychology corpus. The passages gathered here reveal at least three distinct registers in which the term operates. In the structural-semiological tradition, Benveniste — drawing on and critically revising Saussure — treats language as the master semiological system: the irreducible interpretant of all other sign-systems, the medium in which society and individual subjectivity alike are constituted. For Benveniste, language is neither a transparent code nor a mere instrument; it is the site of enunciation, the irreversible act through which a speaker becomes a subject. McGilchrist approaches the term from neurological and phenomenological angles, arguing that language is neither necessary for thought nor for sophisticated communication, that its deepest roots lie in music and embodied emotion, and that its lateralization in the left hemisphere gives it a dominating, reductive relationship to lived experience. Abram, working phenomenologically after Merleau-Ponty, refuses to define language at all, treating it as an open bodily field woven by living speakers in exchange with the animate world. Derrida foregrounds the metaphysical entrapment within language, showing that categories of thought are merely transpositions of categories of language. Rank and Hillman attend to language at the level of expression and soul — its somatic origins, its capacity for deadening or for depth. Together these voices locate language at the intersection of body, sign, subjectivity, and world.
In the library
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the language plays the role, with respect to them all, of semiological interpretant, in other words of a model serving to define the terms and their relationships. Now, the language is itself a semiological system. It is, hierarchically, the first amongst them.
Benveniste argues that language is not merely one sign-system among many but the foundational interpretant upon which all other semiological systems depend for their signifying power.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
TO DEFINITIVELY SAY WHAT LANGUAGE IS is subject to a curious limitation. For the only medium with which we can define language is language itself. We are therefore unable to circumscribe the whole of language within our definition.
Abram, following Merleau-Ponty, insists that language exceeds any definition one can formulate within it, and must instead be approached as an open, living, bodily field of reciprocal exchange.
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996thesis
language is neither necessary for communication – not even for some highly sophisticated kinds of communication; nor for thinking – not even for some highly sophisticated kinds of thinking; although, since we have it, it is clearly involved in some aspects of both.
McGilchrist challenges the received assumption that language is constitutive of thought and communication, arguing instead that it is a secondary, lateralized capacity whose musical and emotional origins precede its referential function.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
to the extent that language is used for communication it probably began as a form of music, deeply rooted in emotion and the body – the most expressive aspects of language still are its 'musical' qualities, pitch variations,
McGilchrist argues that language's communicative origins are musical and somatic rather than referential, locating its expressive depth in qualities that exceed propositional meaning.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World, 2021thesis
language is heterogeneous, personal and social, mental and physiological... For Saussure, a language (langue) organises language (langage). He then separates the language (langue) from writing and, negatively,
Benveniste reconstructs Saussure's foundational distinction between langue and langage, showing that any adequate theory of language must account for its irreducibly heterogeneous character.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
It is what one can say which delimits and organizes what one can think. Language provides the fundamental configuration of the properties of things as recognized by the mind.
Derrida, via Benveniste on Aristotle, argues that supposedly universal categories of thought are in fact projections of the categorial structure of a particular language, collapsing the distinction between thought and linguistic form.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982thesis
Since what we think about the world and what we know of it is, whether we like it or not, mediated largely by language, it's worth taking a closer look at the nature of language, and its relationship to the hemispheres.
McGilchrist uses the hemispheric lateralization of language as a key entry point into understanding how each hemisphere constructs its own world, with language primarily serving the left hemisphere's drive toward categorization and control.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009thesis
it is impossible to pass from the 'sign' to the 'sentence', impossible to make this distinction coincide with the Saussurean distinction of langue and parole, language and speech, because the sign is discontinuous and the sentence is continuous.
Benveniste identifies a fundamental discontinuity between the semiotic order of the sign and the semantic order of the sentence, arguing that no accumulation of discrete units can generate the continuous meaning-event of enunciation.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012thesis
The language in its entirety is invoked by the child in his first attempts at speech. The whole of the spoken language surrounding the child snaps him up like a whirlwind, tempts him by its internal articulations.
Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, Abram presents language as a living, bodily fabric into which the speaking child enters whole, activated by the body's participation rather than by cognitive rule-learning.
Abram, David, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, 1996supporting
The relationship of the speaker to the language determines the linguistic features of the enunciation. The speaker is not 'speaker' before the act of enunciation.
Benveniste's theory of enunciation holds that subjectivity itself is constituted through the act of speaking: the speaker comes into being as a subject only in and through the mobilization of language.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
Great linguists are distinguished by how, with their knowledge and analysis of languages, they discover properties of language through which they interpret and change speakers' 'being in the world'.
Kristeva's preface frames the depth of linguistic inquiry as ontological: genuine analysis of language transforms the analyst's and speakers' existential situation, not merely their conceptual apparatus.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
language's role is in giving command over the world, particularly those parts that are not present spatially or temporally, a world that in the process is transformed from the 'I–thou' world of music (and the right hemisphere) to the 'I–it' world of words (and the left hemisphere).
McGilchrist argues that language's extension of cognitive reach comes at the cost of transforming participatory, relational experience into the objectifying, manipulative stance characteristic of left-hemisphere dominance.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
for most of human history, despite a large brain and presumably high intelligence, they managed to communicate satisfactorily without language as we understand it.
The evolutionary evidence McGilchrist cites suggests that symbolic language is a recent acquisition, implying that vast realms of human intelligence and social life preceded and exceed linguistic mediation.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
The writing system has always and everywhere been the instrument that has permitted a language to semiotise itself. This means that speakers stop on the language instead of stopping on the things enunciated.
Benveniste argues that writing enables the reflexive auto-semiotization of language, the moment when speakers turn their attention from the world to the language itself as a structured object of analysis.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
'Language has as its function to say something. What exactly is this something in view of which language is articulated and how do we delimit it in relation to language itself? The problem of signification is posed'
Benveniste poses the fundamental problem of signification as irreducible to formal description: language's function to 'say something' cannot be captured at the level of signs alone but demands a theory of enunciation and meaning.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
metaphor as the very structure or condition of possibility of all language and of every concept.
Via Nietzsche, Derrida argues that metaphor is not a rhetorical ornament within language but the very condition of possibility for all conceptual and linguistic structure.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982supporting
the language is everywhere. The consideration is pragmatic. What is the language's mode of signifying? It is not a worry about taxonomy that led Saussure to conceive this place for the language.
Benveniste reconstructs Saussure's reasoning for assigning language primacy among semiological systems: not taxonomic hierarchy but the ubiquity and unique mode of signification that language commands.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
not having a word for a colour does not mean we can't recognise it... words can influence our perceptions. They can interfere with the way in which we perceive colours
McGilchrist surveys empirical evidence showing that language shapes but does not determine perception, complicating strong Whorfian positions while acknowledging language's subtle influence on categorical experience.
McGilchrist, Iain, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, 2009supporting
the relationship between thought and speech is manifested in language and not in the ideas that subject and dominate language. Language itself can be wise and draw distinctions through which experience is raised to consciousness and made into a prephilosophical wisdom common to all those who speak that language.
Kerényi holds that language carries its own wisdom independently of the ideas imposed upon it, preserving in its structure a prephilosophical clarity about experience that reflective thought may obscure.
Kerényi, Carl, Dionysos: Archetypal Image of Indestructible Life, 1976supporting
From a historical point of view, a first phase is when writing has served to fix an oral message conceived in the language; a second phase is that of the invention of writing such as it proceeds from the desire to set a b
Benveniste traces the historical phases by which writing transforms language's self-relation, moving from an instrument for fixing oral discourse to an autonomous representational system that enables language to become its own object.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
AP's 'rhetoric as speech of the soul,' speech of soul vs. language of psychology... of psychiatric science as 'deadening'... shift in discourse from literal to poetic
Russell's index of Hillman's views on language reveals his consistent critique of the deadening technicality of psychiatric discourse and his advocacy for poetic, soul-laden speech as the proper medium of depth-psychological work.
Russell, Dick, Life and Ideas of James Hillman, 2023supporting
the basic difference between the individual expression-sound and the collective communication-speech... the individual sound-formation corresponds more or less to an incorporation of the indicated objects by the mouth, while the collectivizing of language to serve as a medium of understanding is more like a giving-out
Rank locates the origin of language in bodily incorporation and expulsion, distinguishing the individual expressive cry from the collective communicative function that transforms private somatic event into shared social medium.
Rank, Otto, Art and Artist: Creative Urge and Personality Development, 1932supporting
Parole (a term Benveniste seldom used) is not simply the actualisation of a langue; its study demands a change of perspective and the creation of a new subdivision of linguistics – for the new perspective creates a new object
The Afterword documents Benveniste's late rejection of the Saussurean code model, arguing that speech-as-enunciation cannot be derived from the language system but demands an entirely new theoretical object and methodology.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012supporting
this language has a configuration in all its parts and as a totality. It is in addition organized as an arrangement of distinct and distinguishing 'signs,' capable themselves of being broken down into interior units... This great structure, which includes substructures of several levels, gives its form to the content of thought
Derrida cites Benveniste's structural characterization of language to show that even apparently neutral linguistic concepts — system, form, content — carry unexamined metaphysical commitments.
Derrida, Jacques, Margins of Philosophy, 1982aside
language is not an adequate archaeological tool for determining which aspects of the psyche have long been known and which are recent. Greek can be no guide.
Hillman warns against using the history of psychological terminology as a guide to the history of psychological phenomena, since the appearance of a word tells us little about the antiquity or continuity of the experience it names.
Hillman, James, The Myth of Analysis: Three Essays in Archetypal Psychology, 1972aside
a language which is addressed neither to their friends nor to their parents, a language spoken and heard by persons unknown. Another level of abstraction is imposed on anyone who accedes to writing
Benveniste describes the progressive levels of abstraction imposed by the acquisition of written language, in which the child must detach from the embodied, situational urgency of spoken address.
Benveniste, Émile, Last Lectures: Collège de France 1968 and 1969, 2012aside