The Freud-Benveniste issue: a review through Milner's and Arrive's readings

• Grant number: 14/05021-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2014
• End date: November 30, 2014
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Linguistics
• Principal Investigator: Nina Virginia de Araujo Leite
• Grantee: João Pedro de Souza Gati
• Host Institution: Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem (IEL). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The articulation between studies of language and psychoanalysis has become gradually more relevant for studies such as in Linguistics and in psychoanalytic research. This relation started with Lacan in a more systematic way, reformulating the notion of sign created by Saussure, besides concerning a notion of a structure proposed in Course in General Linguistics (1916), in a way of making it possible to articulate it to the notion of unconcious, setting a wider and more formalized concept for the Freudian discover. Although such articulation always calls Lacan's name, it is necessary to allege that language has always been inherent to the psychoanalytic technique conceived by Freud. The notion of healing through speech brings with itself this observation, once it is inevitable to make research about speech and language mechanisms in order to understand how the process of passage from the emotionally repressed to the field of conscious. Although being present in Freudian texts, questions referring to language are not included inside a theory itself, what prevents us to make a more straightforward association between both fields. Having this said, this study proposes, initially, to make a research around the conception of language used by Freud, more specifically in his text "The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words", which aimed to make an approach between the lexical form of certain words and the processes of symbolization built during dreams. Freud uses German philologist Karl Abel's work entitled Sprachwissenschaftiliche Abhandlungen, which is an essay about an ancient Egyptian language and about the processes of word formation made by both senses that are opposed. Departing from this reading, Freud says such words are clues of ancient forms of thought which would explain the archaic and regressive character of the oniric expression. French linguist Émile Benveniste criticized Freud's interpretation and questioned the theoretical basis psychoanalysis searches in natural languages. The main point in this study is analyzing if Benveniste's criticism is based in a way it interrogates the psychoanalytical discover and how its observation was seen for the researches of the area. For this aim, Freud's and Benveniste's original texts and posterior rereadings by Milner and Arrivé. (AU)