Wilberg on Wednesday - The Illness Is The Cure pt 24/46

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