Book part: Storytelling: The Role of Written Languages and Visual Languages in Academic Narrations
Abstract
Freud needed only to listen to his patients – “my sons are the cross I must bear” – to understand the reason for their lower back pain: ‘cross’ being, after all, in German, the same word that designates the dorsal region. In psychoanalysis the bodily inscription of a metaphor is understood to convey a repressed thought, such happenstance being known as somatic inscription. Once the unconscious – the primary process – cannot be bound by the laws of language it must express itself through condensation – a process through which two ideas or images combine into a single symbol – and displacement – the transfer of an emotion from its original focus to another object, person, or situation. Jacques Lacan later came to identify condensation and displacement as metonymy and metaphor. For the unconscious is structured like a language (Lacan 1977, pp. 161–197). In logical discourse the fallacy of equivocation is committed when someone uses the same word in different meanings in an argument, implying that the word means the same each time. The fallacy of equivocation is one among many other fallacies in logical argumentation. The term logical fallacy properly refers to a formal fallacy: a flaw in the structure of a deductive argument, which renders the argument invalid. Roughly speaking, the somatic inscription of a metaphor such as ‘my sons are the cross I must bear’ commits the fallacy of equivocation for it juxtaposes two different meanings – the lower back region and a structure consisting essentially of an upright and a transverse piece as a symbol of suffering – in the same signifier. Yet the rationality and hence the unity of the agent are the prejudice of a literary culture. The information processing of oral cultures is based on sensorimotor and mnemonical cues, leading to a metaphoric rather than metonymic apprehension of the world. Only when a literary syllogistic syntax starts to overwrite mythical speech is the human mind trained to disregard all forms of knowledge, which are incommensurable with logical procedures. The unconscious is nothing other than the remainder of a former oral cognition, which goes unaccounted for under a literary disposition.
Preferred Citation
BibTex
Teixeira Pinto, Ana: Storytelling: The Role of Written Languages and Visual Languages in Academic Narrations. In: Gächter, Yvonne;Ortner, Heike;Schwarz, Claudia;Wiesinger, Andreas: Erzählen – Reflexionen im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung / Storytelling – Reflections in the Age of Digitalization. Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press 2008, S. 67-76. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/19815.
@INCOLLECTION{Teixeira Pinto2008,
author = {Teixeira Pinto, Ana},
title = {Storytelling: The Role of Written Languages and Visual Languages in Academic Narrations},
year = 2008,
doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/19815}",
editor = {Gächter, Yvonne and Ortner, Heike and Schwarz, Claudia and Wiesinger, Andreas},
address = {Innsbruck},
booktitle = {Erzählen – Reflexionen im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung / Storytelling – Reflections in the Age of Digitalization},
pages = {67--76},
publisher = {Innsbruck University Press},
}
author = {Teixeira Pinto, Ana},
title = {Storytelling: The Role of Written Languages and Visual Languages in Academic Narrations},
year = 2008,
doi = "\url{http://dx.doi.org/10.25969/mediarep/19815}",
editor = {Gächter, Yvonne and Ortner, Heike and Schwarz, Claudia and Wiesinger, Andreas},
address = {Innsbruck},
booktitle = {Erzählen – Reflexionen im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung / Storytelling – Reflections in the Age of Digitalization},
pages = {67--76},
publisher = {Innsbruck University Press},
}
The item has been published with the following license: Unter Urheberrechtsschutz