Language, Embodiment, and the Therapeutic Address: Toward a Unified Account of the Verbal, the Gestural, and the Signifying in Psychotherapy
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) May 23, 2026 Vassilis Papathanasiou
Psychotherapy depends on language, but its nature is rarely examined deeply. This paper argues that different therapy traditions hold incompatible views of language—from psychoanalysis seeing it as bodily inscription of enjoyment (jouissance), to phenomenology treating it as embodied gesture, to pragmatist views of language as action (speech acts, language games). The paper maps how each tradition uses language: interpretation in classical psychoanalysis, semantic correction in CBT, performative acts in speech-act theory, being-in-the-world in existential therapy, narrative identity construction, intercorporeal attunement in somatic therapies, and as dispensable in contemplative approaches. These views rest on conflicting assumptions about language and body. A unified account requires a post-representationalist theory of language as both action that creates worlds and material event that marks the body.