This text is the second part of the presentation of the essay written by Mª Ángeles García-Carpintero, an alumni of the ISEP Master’s in Speech Therapy. The essay can be consulted and downloaded for free at the following link: ‘The language of mothers. Transmitted and shared language’. You can also consult the first part of the presentation here.
The Meanings
We learned from structuralists that words comprised a signifier, the word itself, and a signified, what that word represents. They primarily focused on collecting the sense of words as signs that entail specific relationships determined by opposition and continuity, considering meanings as carriers of a subjective judgment difficult to analyze, something that Saussure recognized as the fundamental aspect of language, which is always dynamic.
Today we know that words, by themselves, mean nothing or can mean many things, as many as there are people in the world. Meaning is not so much in the words as in the discourse uttered in a specific context and in the intentions and beliefs implicit in the phrases.
Significations tell us about things and the world, about myself as a being with meaning, a being constituted by language and a creator of language, a being that enters into dialogue with oneself, becoming a thinking being, and with the other who constitutes me in a language of which silence and contradiction are a part. This is how, coming from relationship and language, we give life to languages that are born and die, are created and re-created.
Listening to the “Saying” of language, we submit to the meaning of ancient and new signs, fixed and re-created, with which to delve into the meaning or judgment of things and of myself as a being who thinks and names things, a being who recognizes not being able to know everything; we submit to something that transcends us and that we cannot encompass but that reaches us and we recognize as our own, a becoming that, mysteriously, happens from renunciation, silence, and listening.
Meaning and Language
Meaning – both that which interprets words, phrases, and texts, and that which is “felt” or intuited and reinterpreted – is captured, shaped, understood, and expressed in motion. It goes from initial words and gestures related to concrete reality, phrases, texts, and discourses with which we know reality, to what is understood without the need for words. And conversely, we can summarize a meaning, the work of a lifetime, in a title, in a word, a glance, a smile, expressing, in a poetic sense, the entire universe of feelings, beliefs, and desires. We consider literature the true mother of language, not the other way around.
We are in the era of language; language is expression, relationship, and exchange of meaning and, from the detachment that allows me to take distance, creation, but we remain anchored in languages and sign systems that, trying to master, continually escape us. Movement scares us, and we stick to normative and reified knowledge that we find useful and believe we can manage, but authentic learning, that which provokes transformation, occurs in relation and is always creation, expression, transformation, re-creation.
It will be necessary to know these systems, but knowing that they are limited, open, and flexible. Knowing more and better these systems and what those who have dedicated themselves to their study have explained to us, we will have to step back to glimpse, rather than see, something intangible that resonates with us and that we bring to light. We will have to renounce hoarding to be able to shelter and give.
We come into the world having heard a voice, we recognize it, we babble, we speak, we strive to give our own word; we are never satisfied, finally nothing remains but silence and the gaze someone holds for us; that silent and loving gaze shows the purest truth, the unspeakable, that which allows us, again, to speak with a new speaking, a speaking that brings with it the murmur of the source, the echo of a voice that is not, but that is felt, thought, understood, and expressed.
Traversing our own consciousness through what we find painful, incomprehensible, or absurd, we can, finally, come to give and share our own word, a word that liberates, builds, and transforms.
This essay is related to the Master’s in Child and Adolescent Clinical Psychology. If you are interested, do not hesitate to ask us for more information!