From our Study Space we have proposed the possibility of opening a place to think about the conflicts that society and culture pose to us. In this sense, when we say that it is a good habit that has been lost, it is because indeed, we are witnessing a symbolic change that affects civilization as a whole and that is in direct relation to the closure, the obturation, the cancellation of spaces to talk about what worries us.
In any case, it would be a mistake to put all the weight on the side of civilization and its scientific technical advances, since it is known that throughout the history of humanity, it has been precisely the meetings of committed citizens that have allowed to architect social changes.
In this same sense, we, the adults, are in charge of transmitting culture to today's youth. And that is why we are responsible for opening, more and more, spaces for reflection that benefit the possibilities of today's education for the future.
Why do we say that being able to question oneself produces effects on the subject? Why do we believe that these effects translate into modifications both at the family and institutional level? Why to talk about education, the first proposed topic is language? And finally, what is the true power of the word? What are the elements that are played in your opinion, in the complex process of learning?
Without a doubt, language has a privileged place in terms of the constitution of a subject's psyche and its future possibilities of learning. But also, in terms of the possibilities of the existence of a culture and the transmission of knowledge.
Lévi-Strauss, in a conference in which linguists and anthropologists participated, opens the debate on the existing relationship between language and culture, proposing three different points of view, the first would consider language a product of culture, the second it I would consider part and third the very condition of culture. Although Lévi-Strauss prefers to end the debate taking an intermediate position, we will take this third point of view, which expresses as follows: language can be considered as a condition of a culture, and this in a double sense: diachronic, since the individual acquires the culture of his group mainly through language; the child is instructed and educated through speech; he is reprimanded and flattered with words. From a theoretical point of view,language also appears as a condition of culture to the extent that it also has an architecture similar to that of language. Both are built by means of oppositions and correlations, that is, of logical relations.
So, for Lévi-Strauss, culture is a set of symbolic systems that share both language and marriage rules, economic relationships, art, science and religion and that have a certain relationship with each other. This symbolic plot even constitutes his way of subjecting reality, of thinking and acting. Both the prohibitions and what is allowed create the limits to contain the symbolic precipitate that is a subject or a culture.
In my opinion, one of the most important relationships between language and culture is that language is the vehicle for transmission of all these rules that make up the culture of a particular society. The subject acquires culture through language, but at the same time elementary institutions and structures of culture such as the family, are unthinkable without language. Let us ask ourselves, for example, how institutions such as the family or society could have been founded, without minimum basic rules that define what they are, and, in turn, without a language that transmits these laws that support them.
But, even when the subject acquires culture through language, it must be emphasized that language was already there previously. It is in this sense that Dr. Lacan tells us that language with its structure pre-exists the subject. Moreover, it goes so far as to say that the subject is the servant of language, it is determined by it, inasmuch as, before its birth, it is already spoken by its parents and comes to register in that place that its parents' desire gives it. This desire is of course an unconscious desire, since as we will see throughout this course, the analytic experience shows that the subject unfolds as such, not knowing the fundamentals of his deepest desire. This is because this desire is made of language, a language that is in the first instance the language of the parents, but in turn,it is also the inheritance of a discourse, one that has been transmitted through language from generation to generation.
Freud makes an important reflection in this sense, saying that, if the psychic processes of one generation did not continue to develop in the next, each of them would be forced to start learning life from the beginning, which would exclude any possibility of progress in this area.
In this sense, two questions are posed: one because of the extent that we must attribute to psychic continuity within these series of generations and another because of the means and ways that each generation uses to transmit its psychic states to the next.
He admits that, although no generation has the ability to hide psychic facts of some importance from the next, direct communication or tradition, they do not constitute a sufficient explanation of how subsequent generations have managed to assimilate the affective inheritance of those that preceded them. Since repression acts, be it consciously in terms of specific data, be it unconscious, leaving behind certain deformations in history, with which each subject will have to cope, but which in turn originate certain reactions.
And it is exactly at this point that I wanted to reach, the gaps that transmission through language leaves behind, as far as historical truth is concerned. Analytical experience teaches us that truth cannot be decisively objectified, while the need to be transmitted by the word makes it ungraspable in itself. Let's say that each word and each story will be reinterpreted and will take on a specific meaning for each subject, which without a doubt will not be the same as for any other. Proposing us here a very clear example, which is that of siblings of identical parents. Some of you might object, that because they are touched by completely different existential contingencies, both in terms of the moment of desire in which their parents engendered them, and that,Because they are different subjects, they have completely divergent versions of reality, but, following in this direction, I will say that twin brothers show us how heterogeneous the experience of the same story can be, in the same context and at a given time. Depending in any case on what later, each of them can build by themselves, to fill that void.
This is why Lacan speaks of myth, insofar as that which gives a discursive formula to what cannot be transmitted in the definition of truth. It is about a unique meaning, built by a subject, with the shreds of personal history that he was able to rescue, that is, the remains of what he has seen and heard, which has remained in his memory. Thus, a myth is built, which comes to the place of the unknown, of what was not understood, of the traumatic, since what the word cannot explain, comes to us, subjects of language, to the rather than traumatic. This is why Freud takes the tragedy of Oedipus from Greek mythology, to explain something of the traumatic, of what was not said by the discourse of the time, but which he considered important, since what is not said is transmitted as repressed, and as an affective inheritance,it has a weight in the constitution of the psyche.
In order not to take the myth, which you surely already know, and thus not to increase what is imaginary at stake in it, which unfortunately leads to misinterpretations by those who do not know the theory, we will take a beautiful Freudian text that allows, through its descriptive acuity of observable phenomena in the development of the infantile subject, to understand what the infantile psyche does with the emptiness of knowledge and the inherent anguish.
Freud suggests that every subject has to go through the experience of being separated from their parents in the course of their development. Getting rid of this authority, he says, is one of the most painful but also one of the most necessary tasks that he will have to go through. Affirming in turn that the failure of this task is a turning point in the triggering of a neurosis.
Account that for the small child his parents are, at first, the only source of authority and source of all faith. Being their most intense and decisive desire to come to resemble them. But as he progresses in intellectual development, it is inevitable that the child begins to perceive that his parents are far from the perfection that the innocent childhood imagination attributed to them. This is how this feeling of dissatisfaction leads him to undertake criticism of his own parents and comparison with other ideals. This incipient estrangement of the parents, says Freud, which can be called the family novel of the neurotic.
Indeed, Freud highlights as a characteristic feature of the essence of neurosis an intense imaginative activity, which manifests itself first in childhood games, and later dominates all family relationships towards the prepubertal period, persisting even beyond puberty, in a way daytime dreams, which serve to fulfill wishes and rectify those daily experiences that may have caused the little fantasist's anguish.
All these fictions, apparently so full of hostility on the part of the child, are only a first attempt at separation from their parents. This attempt at separation will have to be actualized in the future, as long as the subject is once again faced with new situations of separation that will bring about a reworking, with the result of a new synthesis. It is about a reactualization, not as a succession of chronological stages, but as logical moments that each individual goes through. Being this subjective nature of the process, an important detail to take into account, then, the fiction that each child has been able to elaborate, has a more or less fixed character throughout its development. I say more or less fixed, because each new process of separation and consequent mourning,will allow rectifications to take place. It is these rectifications to which the analytic experience appeals.
So, if the child, from this perspective, is an active subject and responsible for the unique interpretation that he can give to the events of his life, it is, on the other hand, necessary to highlight the role that we have been giving to the discursive inheritance of family fictions. These will take all their value, as an experience of the contingent, that the child has been able to see and hear, throughout her existence. Thus, the magnitude that the family discourse takes on the constitution of the infantile psyche remains implicit.
Ultimately, the word is the only way in which we can transmit what we want, only that it is pregnant with particular meanings. These meanings that each of us attribute to words are given to us, based on our experiences, our history and the interpretations that we personally made of them. In general, these interpretations are more or less stable ways of making sense of the things that happen to us. This is why we say that misunderstanding is inherent in communication between beings who speak, because, when we speak, we do so from our fictions, which allow us to read reality, among many others.
