5 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
French psychoanalyst who 'returned to Freud' by reinterpreting psychoanalysis through structural linguistics — arguing that the unconscious is structured like a language, that desire is the desire of the Other, and that the subject is constituted by its entry into language (the symbolic order).
Austrian-British philosopher — author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations — who created two completely different philosophies (early: logic as the limit of language; late: language as family resemblance in forms of life) — the most influential philosopher of the 20th century in the analytic tradition.
Nietzsche's 1873 unpublished essay arguing that truth is 'a mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms' — that all human knowledge is perspectival and anthropocentric, that concepts are worn-out metaphors we have forgotten are metaphors — anticipating his later perspectivism.
American Jungian analyst who wrote Psyche Speaks — a Jungian study of words as carriers of psychological meaning — and who has contributed to the Jungian understanding of language, particularly the psychological depths concealed in word etymology and the dream's use of language.
Theological and philosophical tradition — also called negative theology or via negativa — holding that the divine transcends all positive description and can only be approached through negation (God is not finite, not composite, not comprehensible) — the dominant mystical-theological tradition in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.