When the words are missing - a cognitive analysis of silence in psychoanalysis

• Main Author: Daniel Widlöcher
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2004-01-01
• Series: INTERthesis
• Subjects: Neuropsicologia; Psicopatologia; Comunicação; Linguagem; Psicanálise; Neuro-psychologie; Psycho-pathologique; Communication; Langage; Psychanalyse; Neuropsychology; Psychopathology; Language; Psychoanalysis
• Online Access: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/interthesis/article/view/634

The neuropsychology of the aphasia keeps on making us discover some new functional dissociation liable to alter the language functions (Shallice, 1988). This way, it contributes to our knowledge of the mechanisms, which regulate these functions. In this sense, neuropsychology fits perfectly the main stream of the psychopathologic undertaking. Here - and this is precisely a fact that might surprise us – the way of communication suitable to the psychoanalytical situation can be compared to that one. At least, this is what I will try to demonstrate, having, as a starting point, a kind of absence of words, apparently very different from the aphasia, but that, from a certain point of view, can be faced as the expression of a functional dissociation of the language. This point of view will apply the theoretical frames come from the cognitive analyses of the pragmatics of communication to the observation of the psychoanalytical communication. (Fodor, 1987; Sperber et Wilson, 1989).