eiseEducation

In therapy we often discover that two people can speak the same language while living in different worlds. Wittgenstein reminds us that meaning lies in use, in language games shaped by our histories. Participants may both name “anger” or “fear,” with very different grammars or intentions, masked by a similarity of syntax, difference camouflaged by sameness.

The beliefs underscoring many patients’ language games remain rigid and ritualized, with foreclosure that imprisons as it protects. Such deflation occurs with compulsive compliance or numbing addictions. Here words are dead on arrival, keeping feeling — and the clinician — at bay.  Therapists too can retreat into the shelter of technical language and familiar interpretive frames, where fluency replaces encounter and understanding is assumed rather than discovered.

The task of therapy is to embrace these bridges to nowhere: a failure to comprehend,  shared gaps calling for new grammar—a dually spoken staccato, rhythm, and tonality, leading to distinctively collaborative scores that are never quite complete.