The Healing Word: Its Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

After presenting a brief review of the history of helping people solely by language (listening and speaking), the author reemphasizes the intrinsically verbal, noncoercive nature of the cure of souls (and of psychoanalysis as a model of psychotherapy); the intrinsically non-verbal, voluntary nature of the cure of bodies (medical treatment); and the intrinsically physical-and-verbal, coercive nature of the cure of minds (psychiatric treatment). Commingling and confusing these distinct enterprises and the accompanying emphasis on diagnosis and treatment have destroyed the cultural and legal conditions required for the practice of purely verbal, noncoercive helping (psychotherapy). Psychoanalysis is, in toto, a language art, a language praxis. There can be neither mute patients nor deaf analysts. Psychoanalysis is as immediate to word and syntax as mining is to the earth. (Steiner, 1989, p. 107)