Disease as ‘Organ Speech’
“Through the long succession of
millennia, man has not known himself physiologically; he does not
know himself even today.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
Do failing organs or disturbances to the
functioning of their physiological capacities lead to illness – or
are organic or physiological functions and capacities the embodiment
of capacities of another sort – capacities of feeling awareness ?
Thus when we speak of someone ‘losing
heart’, feeling ‘disheartened’ or ‘heart-broken’, for
example, we are not just using the language of a biological ‘organ’
– in this case the heart – as a mere metaphor for a psychological
state or sense of ‘dis-ease ’. It is the other way round. Heart
disease is itself a living
biological metaphor of
subjective states of dis-ease and distress such as feeling
‘heart-broken’, ‘heartless’ or ‘cold-hearted’.
Similarly, respiratory disorders such as
asthma arise from a subjective sense of feeling ‘stifled’ or
‘having no room to breathe’ in our lives, just as digestive
disorders are the expression of aspects of our lived experience and
life world that we do not feel able to ‘stomach’ or ‘digest’
in our awareness.
Biological medicine seeks ‘organic’
causes for illness in dysfunctions of our physiological
organs – and sees even
psychological disorders as the result of such organic dysfunctions,
as disorders of our brain chemistry. As a result, biological medicine
is blind to the deeper meaning and truth of the bodily language and
‘metaphors’ we use to describe what are usually thought of only
as ‘mental’ or ‘psychological’ feelings and states. It does
not see that the language of these bodily metaphors is a way of
recognising that the physical body and its organs are not a
biological machine or a mere product of our genes but a living
biological language of the
human being.
In contrast, Freud spoke of bodily
symptoms as a type of organic
language or ‘organ speech’
(Organsprache).
Similarly, Life Medicine recognises all organs and functions of the
‘physical’ body as the biological expression of organised
capacities and functions of another body –
our ‘lived body‘ – the body of our feeling awareness of all
that we experience in our lives.
In German there are not one but two words
for ‘the body’ – Körper
and Leib.
The only equivalents of Körper
in English are the words
‘corpus’ and ‘corpse’. ‘Corpse’ is also the root meaning
of the Greek word ‘soma’, from which the term ‘somatic’
derives. It refers of course to a dead body as opposed to a living
one. There is however another German word for body – Leib
– that can be translated as
‘lived body‘ or ‘life’ body –
for it is part of a whole family of words to do with ‘life’
(Leben)
and ‘living’ (leben).
These words include erleben
(‘to experience’) and Erlebnis
(an experience). Through the inner lens of the German language in
other words, life (Leben)
and living (leben)
are understood essentially as realm of subjective
experiencing (er-leben).
Thus the body as Leib
or ‘lived body’ refers to our own ‘experienced’ and
‘experiencing’ body’ – the body of our living experience
of ourselves, our lives and our entire life world. The basic
‘capacities’ of the lived body or Leib
therefore have to do with what we are or are not able to do with our
experience (Erlebnis)
of living (leben),
of life (Leben)
and of our ‘life world’ (Lebenswelt).
In physiological terms, the capacities of
the lived body are our capacity to sense,
perceive, breathe in, digest and
metabolise
all that we experience, allowing it to circulate
within our awareness and thus nourish
our very being
with life-giving meaning.
Both our sense organs and other
biological organs such as our lungs, stomach and heart, together with
their corresponding physiological
functions, are
essentially nothing but organic and physiological embodiments
of capacities
belonging to our lived body as a ‘psychical organism’ or ‘body
of awareness’ –
an awareness more or less
open to or capable of sensuously embracing, feeling and perceiving,
breathing in, digesting and metabolising all that we experience in
our lives – and in this way extracting meaning from it.
On the other hand, any lack
or dysfunction of these basic
capacities of awareness belonging
to the lived body may also embody
itself – finding expression
in what biomedicine then sees only as purely ‘physiological’ or
‘organic’ dysfunctions, disorders or ‘diseases’ – for
example respiratory, digestive, metabolic or circulatory diseases.
“We cannot say that the organ has
capacities, but must say that the capacity has organs… capability,
articulating itself into capacities creating organs characterises the
organism as
such.”
Martin Heidegger
The idea that biological organs are a
“creation” or embodiment of the very capabilities or capacities
we associate with that organ is of course a radical one.
Yet along with the family of German words
that includes the ‘lived body‘ (Leib),
‘life’ (Leben)
and experiencing (er-leben)
goes another word that hints at how this idea may be understood: the
verb ‘to body’ (leiben).
For as Heidegger remarked in addressing a
circle of doctors:
“We know by now a great deal –
almost more than we can encompass – about what we call the body,
without having seriously thought about what bodying
is … The bodying of life is
nothing separate by itself, encapsulated in the ‘physical mass’
in which the body can appear to us…”
Hence also the profound significance of
another insight of his, namely that:
“Every feeling is an embodiment attuned in this or that way, a mood
that embodies in this or that
way.”
It is through the lived body that we
quite literally embody or ‘body’ felt tones or ‘moods’ of
feeling awareness or ‘feeling tones’ – allowing them to find
expression in cellular tone, skin tone, muscle and organ tone, i.e.
in ‘organ speech’ – as well as in the tones of our vocal
speech. The lived body then, is the very source and essence of the
human ‘organism ’.
For it is that musical or tonal
‘instrument’ (the root meaning of the Greek word organon
from which the term ‘organism’ is derived) through which we
inwardly ‘speak’ or ‘utter’ our organs themselves from out of
shaped and patterned tones of feeling awareness or ‘feeling tones’.
For, what are sound, music and speech except a shaping or patterning
of tone?
Yet feeling tones can be either healthy
and ‘sound’ or else more or less muddied, discordant and
‘unsound’. This is also the reason we speak of someone’s health
or a particular organ being or not being in ‘sound’ condition,
and associate health with ‘soundness’, the words sound
and soundness being
the root meaning of the German words for ‘healthy’ and ‘health’
– gesund
and
Gesundheit.
The human organism then – indeed any
organism – is nothing ‘biological’ or ‘organic’ in the
narrow scientific sense. It is ‘biological’ only in the essential
sense of being that instrument or
organon through which ‘life’
(bios)
speaks itself in the form of fleshly organs – giving physical shape
and tone to felt patterns, shapes, tones and textures of feeling
awareness.
The essence of any organism consists of
organising
field patterns of awareness.
These in turn are what give ordered and organised shape and form to
that larger patterned field
of awareness that
constitutes the perceived ‘environment’ or life
world of any organism.
Human language
too is an organised and organising structure, one which shapes and
patterns our specifically human awareness and perception of the
world. And language itself is made up of ‘organising patterns of
awareness’ that make it an integral part of the lived body – and
not a mere function of something we call ‘the mind’ or of the
brain as a biological organ.
It is because it is an integral part of
the human organism that the body and its organs itself figure so
strongly in language itself
– in countless everyday expressions relating to bodily organs
such as the heart (feeling ‘disheartened’ or ‘a stab in the
heart), to parts of
the body (‘having one’s feet on the ground’) and bodily
functions such as respiration (feeling ‘stifled’ or having ‘no
room to breathe’).
The body even figures in the mere use of
simple prepositions
such as ‘in’ and ‘out’, ‘on’ and ‘off’, ‘up’ and
‘down’ – for example being ‘onto’ or ‘into’ something’,
feeling ‘up’ or ‘down’, ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘off
colour’ or ‘out of’ one’s mind. For all these expressions
arise from and reflect our felt bodily relation to space – as also
does the use of words such as ‘upset’, ‘unstable’ or
‘imbalanced’ and expressions such as ‘leaning to one side’,
‘finding one’s ground’ or ‘shifting’ one’s stance or
attitude, posture or position.
This all-pervasive bodily dimension of
language itself – and its roots in bodily experiencing – was
first explored in depth by Lakoff and Johnson in their book Metaphors
We Live By. Yet it also lends
support to the basic principles of Life Medicine, as well as to Freud
’s notion of ‘organ speech ’. This notion is in turn closely
associated with what, in his last years, he came to call ‘The
Second Fundamental Principle of Psychoanalysis ’.
This is the principle that ‘bodily’
states and symptoms were not merely things that emerged ‘parallel’
with or ‘concomitant’ to unconscious mental or ‘psychic’
states. Instead what were previously thought of in psychoanalysis
only as “somatic concomitants” of these states were recognised as
“the truly psychical” (Freud ).
The radical implication of this principle
is that the true foundation and focus of psychoanalysis is not ‘the
interpretation of dreams’ or some mysterious entity called ‘the
unconscious’ but the language
of the body – which finds
expression both in our waking life and in our dreams and ‘dreaming
body’ and is the symbolic key to all forms and symptoms of illness.
Yet the significance of Freud’s new
‘foundational principle of psychoanalysis’ has still not been
registered by most psychoanalysts or schools of psychoanalysis –
and certainly not in medical theory and practice.
Only through the work of the Argentinean
psychoanalyst Luis Chiozza did
psychoanalysis come to both appreciate and apply this principle.
He did so by recognising, as Life
Medicine does, that the two distinct
but inseparable dimensions of
what Freud called ‘organ speech’ – verbal expression such as
‘feeling stifled’ or ‘stabbed in the heart’ on the one hand,
and experienced physical sensations or symptoms such as breathing
difficulties or heart pains on the other – share a common
source. In other words,
symptoms of illness itself are not only reflected in language that
describes felt states of dis-ease. Instead illness itself
is a language.
As a psychoanalyst, Chiozza saw the
common source of illness and language as ‘the unconscious’. In
Life Medicine this common source is seen as life itself – as
experienced through the lived body.
Yet it was Chiozza who also first
developed a methodological approach to illness akin to Life
Doctoring. Derived from Victor von Weizsäcker
and called the ‘pathobiographical’ method, it involves seeking
the ‘hidden story’ behind a patient’s illness by finding links
between its biology on the one hand, and the biography or life story
of the patient on the other. Such links can above all be sought and
found through the language of
illness and through
understanding illness itself as
a language.
References:
Chiozza, Luis A. Hidden
Affects in Somatic Disorders
Chiozza, Luis A. Why
Do We Fall Ill? – The Story Hiding in the Body
Heidegger, Martin, Zollikon
Seminars
Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors
We Live By
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