The Psychological Power of Language

Sayyed Mohsen Fatemi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351695329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Psycolinguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume shows how the psychology and power of language can create realities. It examines the psychological implications of language as a way of being and not just as an instrument of communication. It discusses how a shift in language gives rise to an existential transformation, and shows how creative modes of expression lead to a radical transformation of beings. Throughout, both the theoretical and practical implications of the psychological power of language are presented, particularly howlanguage may result in a healthier inter- and intrapersonal world. It will interest upper-level students and researchers of language in Psychology, Linguistics, Philosophy and Education, as well as professional counselors.

1
The Psychology of Language

Language is quintessentially tied to our life. From the early stages of cognitive, emotional and behavioral development, one can see the interplay of language in creating, shaping and changing our life.

One may recall the sweetest or the bitterest moments of his/her life interwoven with language in either its explicit verbal manifestation and locutionary acts, or through the non-verbal appearance of language in its broadest sense.

Negotiations, interactions, communications, raptures and ruptures, celebrations and farewells, promises and breaches, love and hate, literacy and ignorance are all linked to the sundry yet comprehensive presence of language.

Oppressions and encroachments, victimization and manipulations, loyalties and betrayals, devotion and emancipation have been embedded within language.

The romantic and dramatic tintinnabulation of feelings and emotions, the revolution of inner thoughts and their manifestos in scribing philosophies, policies, regulations, laws and doctrines have transpired within language and by language.

Language has been illuminating in pouring light, perspicacity, sagacity and erudition into people’s minds and hearts, and yet it has been misleading in misrepresenting, misinforming, distorting and destroying lives.

It has been through the power of language that affection, connectedness, understanding, appreciation, togetherness, consummation, belonging and longing have substantiated their sensibility within human life. Language has been silently or vociferously lingering deep down through the reverberation of agonies, deprivations, calamities and tragedies of human existence.

Language has been powerful in shifting attention in politics and political games, and yet has acted so innocently in revelatory experiences of childlike worlds.

Language has been suppressed, silenced and suffocated through language, and it has been language that has displayed its domineering power in certain discursive modes.

Language has enlivened, resuscitated, revitalized and exhilarated people whilst it has saddened, depressed, demoralized and annihilated people.

Language has served as a panacea in decoding secrets, in giving rise to liveliness, vivacity and fervor, and yet it has mischievously operated in covering, concealing, hiding and deviating, and erasing enthusiasm, authenticity, ebullience and truth.

Language has turned out to be rigorous and vital, while paradoxically weak, feeble and paralyzed.

Language has led to reconciliation, compassion and peace, and it has also brought war, conflicts and animosity.

Storms of human emotional upheavals, cyclones of human confusion and discombobulation, the barren land of misunderstanding, and the quagmire of loneliness may demonstrate the presence of specificity of language and its continued sovereignty.

The apogee of sacrifice, the celebration of synergy, the apex of values, the sunrise of awareness and the glory of perceptiveness have also displayed the presence of language.

Language’s expressiveness and receptiveness have had consequential implications.

When you and I have not expressed our language and have found no body to find our language and our language has been denied, deplored, decried, depreciated, derided and diminished, this lack of expressiveness and lack of receptiveness have been with us and will remain with us until we find empowerment to voice our language.

Deep down among psychological symptoms, emotional disturbances, emotional pandemonium, cognitive estrangement, disillusioned predilections and proclivities, there lies a language unspoken to the world.

The ability to receive voices, to be sensitive towards them, to empathize with them, to recognize them, to help them be heard and to legitimize them, to give them their own privilege, to be receptive towards them calmly, amicably and openly would develop a community of souls that feel connected, nourished, taken care of, loved and accepted.

Our era is shrouded with a pretentious, supercilious, ostentatious parade of silencing voices by the name of languages that appear to be conspicuously right, saliently beautiful and remarkably piercing. The parade flows through our life sometimes quietly, and sometimes so fast that we don’t recognize it for years until the hammering of its effects would echo with our bewilderment, our perplexity and our behaviors. The hypocrisy ensnared through language subtly and clandestinely creates a world where our attachments to simulacrum have brought us the intellectually somnambulating dance in the mirage of our given simulation of our own languages.

Our voices have been mechanically, artistically, cognitively, emotionally and intellectually replaced by pseudo-voices that categorize our modes of being and becoming in a dogmatic compartmentalization of possibilities.

The language of possibility, given and promoted by dominant languages of our era, encapsulates the possibility of voicing alternative ways of voicing our life and our experiences.

Possibility, itself, is bound by the language of possibility in the pre-marked language that would endorse the degree, the intensity, the scope and the measure of possibilities.

Our voices may be lost through the hum-drum of the bombastic flurry of voices that are meant to be highlighted to distract us from our own voices. This may have its own roots in the childhood experiences of life associated with abuse, or it might as well be perceptible in the hue and cry of the manipulative, deceptive political and economic configuration.

Therapy and its multifarious forms, including psychoanalysis, may help people to discover how their own voices have been left behind in the backyard of their early experiences, and their detachment from the abandoned voices have unfolded themselves in their seemingly non-sensible behaviors. Nonetheless, the process may not be that easy in the macro levels where people may find themselves heavily sleeping in the long dreams that only portray voices other than their authentic ones.

To bring mindfulness to language and to help language become mindful may be one of the crucial tasks of our era. The tyranny of our mindlessness in our languages may be so long-standing and strenuously penetrating that questioning its legitimacy and challenging its sustainability may seem to be absurd, impossible and irrational.

Language has served as a prison where it has limited our movement, our views and our conversation. Yet, it has brought us freedom from the manacles of our enslavement imposed through the limiting languages which divested us of looking for our languages.

Voices have, then, helped us breathe and find our own voice, or have monopolized the use of certain voices to be acceptable, approvable and admirable.

Helping people find their own voice and celebrate its uniqueness may be at the top of the list for any educational, pedagogical and therapeutic programs that aim to dissipate psychological and emotional malaise.

Our era is steeped in fabrication of multilayered voices that may be the byproduct of an intricate interplay of complex political and economic factors.

In the massiveness of all types of emergent, albeit artificial, voices, there may lie the multiplicities of voices that may prompt an accelerated entanglement in recognizing the appealable modes of expressiveness.

Living through acceleration, massiveness and multiplicity has brought an absence from finding and locating one’s own voice. Languages have been pre-occupying in that they have espoused fragmentation, so much so that one would need to see himself/herself through the taxonomy of voices.

When absent, one lives far from a coherent and solidified articulation of self-expressiveness through his/her authentic voice; he/she is in quest of a template seen as the sensibility of voicing out voices. In the cul-de-sac of single voices, one may not be encouraged to make a turn to look for other avenues of belonging where one’s voice may be nested.

Once presence goes away and absence resides, fragmentation and multiplicities move along: they impose their caricaturist image of expressiveness.

Once you are absent as in the case of a conversation with your spouse or a friend, the interlocutory relationship is frozen in cliché, stereotyped and superficial communication. The absence is embroiled in detachment and fragmentation so wholeness is replaced by disengagement. The increased absence would go against closeness and connectedness, only bringing distance and disconnection.

Once one’s voice is lost, he/she is more susceptible to multiplicities in the hopes of getting recognized through identification with the extensions of the absence-oriented fragmentation.

Mindfulness would facilitate the process of getting in touch with your own voice while recognizing the socially, politically, economically and culturally constructed voices.

The journey may be cumbersome, as it requires perseverance and courage: two gems that are often missing in the structural pattern of mindlessly encouraged multiplicities of our era.

Mindfulness of language and language use and mindful listening to one’s own language and choosing the language away from absence would commence the prelude to creating a creative path of life.

This would potentially require an understanding of the nature of language, its psychological rhythms, its powerful power to empower and disempower voices, its meanders and its perlocutionary impacts.

The simplicity of language may not have often been an indication of its emptiness, as there are innumerable examples of language oppressiveness in the seemingly rich texture of expressiveness.

Our orthodox, conventional and rule-guided modes of learning to voice our voices and to language our experiences have phenomenologically left us a language heritage that almost dictates our ontological modes of recognition: it moves us in line with categories whereby stop signs may not allow us to go further or fathom alternative modes of finding our voices. This has a lot to do with our upbringing, education, schooling, associations and peer groups but also the structural societal, political and economic contexts. In the pages to follow, you see examples of moving in line or beyond the architecturally promoted context of language.

Change may begin with a change of language: a language that we have been subscribed to or others have chosen for us. This in either case may have been a mindless choice, where our voices have been intermingled with those artificial ones that we may not want to associate with.

Our mindlessly induced voices have kept us away from self-discovery where the power of our voices would have given rise to drastically different modes of realities both for our own and others. Language is, therefore, creational and creative. It may shape, create, engender and offer novel status in one’s existential bearings. Language is then ontologically transformative, revolutionizing and changing.

As to a social revolution that brings its own language and is inspired by a special language of its own, one’s radical transformation of consciousness would transpire through language. If not changed, there would be no grammar of understanding, no reciprocal perceptiveness and no brain-to brain coupling.

To bring the change in language, one may need to facilitate the psychological preparation of expressiveness and receptiveness through both attunement and inter-subjectivity. The former may require a simultaneous connectedness in the emotional level with the interlocutor, whereas the latter would require a concurrent link to the cognitive repertoire of the illocutionary and locutionary framework.

The psychological preparation of both functions would help facilitate the process of a parallel or almost similar process of responsiveness, expressiveness and receptiveness.

When talking to a ten-year-old child, the use of jargon and technical terms would work against establishing inter-subjectivity as inattention towards his/her emotional position such as anger or sadness would impede the process of putting into effect the right mode of attunement.

Our world today is suffering both from lack of inter-subjectivity and attunement. The raging conflicts in different parts of the world, the familial violence and its expansion in our daily life, the political crises in a wide variety of contexts, the increasing list of alumni that may see increasing gaps between what they were told in classes and the social realities of their lived experiences, the increasingly huge psychological distance among family members, labeling people on a daily basis in our mediated world through mass media, may all bring numerous levels of disconnection where language is somehow missing, absent, distorted, limited, constricted, filtered and minimized.

It may be good enough to explore or even have a quick peek through Donald Trump’s daily barrage of modes of expressiveness to examine how language determines our construction of our realities with impacts on people’s lives.

The mapping feature of language may often be mindlessly wrapped in the midst of our daily engagements and its routinized constriction. Language provides us with “is” and “ought” through the socially constructed imperatives that may determine the indexes of our sensibility, the magnitude of our progress and the extent to which we may be articulate and may be tacit in voicing ourselves and others.

Just as modern transportation has had an impact on our viewing of the world and creating a perspective way different from that of the horse-carriages, the prevalence of languages through which we are encouraged to voice our beings and oneness may have an impact on our ontological modes: the mapping’s instructions would determine the whereabouts of exploration, the realms of examinations and the domains of our sensibility.

This might be in line with the inner nature of language and its leading frameworks that may appear to allow specific transformation in the syntactical configuration of language and its structural adaptability. But the leap is immeasurably immense and infinite in the semantics level with its own generative pragmatics implications.

Yet, here what I have in mind is neither of those, but the psychological buoyance and its vast manifestations. The psychological aspect may explain how the mapping instructed and prescribed through the dominant language, whether on the individual or collective level, may create dormant domains of thinking while gushing out highly promoted sleuths. The psychological mapping may help us find the emergent of associative, affective and marginal meanings in the midst of our encounter with the core meanings.

The psychological connection to our voices may reveal how our reconciliation to exploring and scrutinizing our lost voices would raise freshness and newness to our minds and our hearts.

This might open up the question as to a search within multiple voices to discern a single unified and coherent voice that may have been surreptitiously forgotten or have been left unnoticed in the midst of tenaciousness, disturbances or disequilibrium imposed on the emotional and affective levels.

For an examination one may look into Karl Marx’s writings or Schopenhauer’s to see how their voicing of their voices has been influenced by their psychological positions: Look at Marx’s writings after and before his being denied marriage with the German girl whom he loved and the religious authorities’ opposition to the marriage because of Karl’s ideas. The same might be examined in Schopenhauer’s diction of describing the fair sex for women and the trail of the emotional underpinnings in his tumultuous experience with his conflict-ridden parents.

This is not to say that one should always suffice to merely look for the psychological underpinnings of one’s voice. But it iterates that modes of expressiveness, their sitting places, their landing impact, their unfolding format, their tone down or vibrant appearances, their smoothness or roughness would help us go back and see how the psychological interplay of intricate conscious and unconscious factors both on the individual and collective levels would have contributed to creating specific produced verbatim. We would see the expansion of more of this in the following chapters of the book.

Programs like Linguistic Word Inquiry may help us understand some of the aforementioned features as it claims that the mere use of passive verbs might be suggestive of the possibility of lying more than telling the truth, or analysis of couple’s conversation with the absence of pronoun “we” and the frequent use of “I” might suggest a high degree of conflict with the possibility of divorce.

In the meantime, persuasive models such Elaboration Likelihood Model, Yale Model, Cognitive Response, etc. might also display how the right or the wrong re...