You Are What You Speak: Sapir-Whorf

The Sapir-Whorf principle is also known as 'the principle of linguistic relativity'. It claims that our conception of the world is shaped by--even controlled by--our language.

The 'strong' version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that that language determines thought--in other words, you can't think at all outside the boxes created by the words you use. The 'weak' version holds that language influences, but does not completely determine thought.

This theory led linguists in the 70's to investigate colour perception. They eventually found that although we tend to segment the colour spectrum according to the ways our language provides for us, we are nevertheless able to see all the colours. (This supports the weak version.) Traditional Welsh, for example, has the word 'glas', that describes a certain grey/green/blue colour. English speakers don't have that word, but they can see the colour.

In her science fiction novel, Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin shows how linguistic relativity works, and how the words we have available to us control what we do and do not perceive. She does it by inventing both a word, and the concept that it describes:

"When you look at another person, what do you see? Two arms, two legs, a face, an assortment of parts. Am I right? Now, there is a continuous surface of the body, a space that begins with the inside flesh of the fingers and continues over the palm of the hand and up the inner side of the arm to the bend of the elbow. Everyone has that surface; in fact, everyone has two of them.
I will name that the 'athad' of the person. Imagine the athad, please. See it clearly in your mind -- perceive, here are my own two athads, the left one and the right one. And there are both of your athads, very nice ones.
Where there was no athad before, there will always be one now, because you will perceive the athad of every person you look at, as you perceive their nose and their hair. From now on.... Now it exists. Now I can say, 'What beautiful athads you have.' "

The process of learning another language in sufficient depth to really speak it changes us. Every language describes the world differently. Those of us who are bilingual can tend to feel we have two personalities inside us, with slightly (or considerably) different conceptions of the world. The way we are in the world, and who we feel ourselves to be, varies depending which language we are speaking.

Even if are monolingual, we may have had a flavour of what this is like. Most of us have probably had the experience of knowing something, but knowing that we knew it until someone named it for us. For example, I knew I had a certain way of interacting with nature, but couldn't describe it, or explain why it was different from another way of interacting with nature, until I read Martin Buber's book I And Thou. Buber coined the term "I/Thou relationship". When I read it, I knew instantly what he meant, that it described my experience, and that it rendered that experience communicable for the first time. This reflects the weak form of linguistic relativity--I was able to experience something, but that experience was not fully conceivable until I was provided with language that could express it.

This is why communication--especially therapy--is tricky across languages. It's one root of 'othering'--it's hard to really get the world view of a person of a different linguistic culture, and even harder to get that their 'strange' worldview is equally real, equally normal, and equally valid, unless you have had the experience of trying to squeeze your reality through the funnel of a foreign language.

First, Know Your Djinn: More on Ethnopsychiatry

Ethnopsychiatry was developed in Paris by Dr Tobie Nathan—a classically trained psychiatrist treating immigrant patients from West and North Africa, who did not respond well to methods based on a Western paradigm.

A significant part of the problem these particular clients have is that they have not been able to acculturate to the host culture, and so they live in a dislocated zone: between a culture from which they have been separated, and one within which they do not or cannot fit. Since much of their problem consists in this dislocation, the act of being reconnected with their ancestral culture, and strengthened in their identity as one who carries this culture, even in a foreign land, is a vital part of their return to health.

Patients at the ethnopsychiatry center are seen with their families, by a treatment team which includes an ‘ethno-clinical mediator’, who is a specialist in the patient’s language and culture. The consultation happens in the patient’s own language, with an interpreter so that the patient does not have to translate their reality through the filter of a foreign language which lacks or distorts the ideas they need to express.

Ethnopsychiatry: basic assumptions
Ethnopsychiatry posits that our culture is intrinsic to who we are, rather than something overlaid on top of a ‘neutral’ self. Our personal identity therefore is inextricable from our cultural identity.

Ethnopsychiatry is based on structuralist analysis: the idea that anything (including any symptom) has meaning only by virtue of its position at the intersection of a matrix of interwoven relationships. So behind any pathology is a whole system of thought, actions, actors, and purposes--which constitute its meaning and its usefulness in expressing psychic dis-ease.

In order to effectively treat someone, you have to use their own, culturally-ratified values and beliefs. Each culture has its own system of values and beliefs around personal misfortune, illness, therapists, and treatment techniques. This is of course not only true of people from traditional cultures—in Western society, we believe that talking about emotions will help, that crying is good for us, and that taking pills can make us better. These are no more ‘normal’ than going to a shaman and making a fetish doll; they just seem more normal to us, since we grew up being taught that these are effective means of curing ourselves.

“Curing” the client involves making meaning out of the patient’s symptoms, in terms of their own cultural mythology and values. This results not only alleviates symptoms, but helps the client (re)connect to their culture—strengthening their identity, as part of a stronger cultural identity.

Example 1: The djinn
The djinn (spirit), is an important part of the range of psychopathologies available to the people of North Africa. To think of a djinn merely as an imaginary spirit would be an error, since this leaves out the web of social and cultural factors that carry the real significance of the djinn in peoples’ lives. A djinn is radically other, but still the mirror image of the human being. Djinns have gender, they can reproduce by having children, and they have a religion, being Muslim, Christian, Jewish or Pagan. However, “they live in the other world; the world of the night, the desert, the forest, the bush, of rubbish, of ruins, of sewers, of the blood of animals”. Djinns are creatures of boundaries and limits. One of their functions is to mediate difficult transitions.

Since all djinns are different, in order to treat someone possessed by a djinn, the healer must get to know the djinn, find out its name and geneology, discover what its intentions are, investigate what it desires and needs, identify the objects it likes, and define the acts and rituals it expects. With this information, the healer can enter into rites that constitute negotiations with the djinn. Finally the healer can identify the benefits the client gains from his or her association with the djinn.

In this approach, ethnopsychiatry joins James Hillmann, with his insistence on respecting the pathology for its living message, rather than trying to diagnose it, dissect and label it, analyze and interpret it. It also joins with the most effective traditional healers in that the aim is not to cure the patient of believing in djinns, but rather to respect the djinn and treat with it in a creative, ritualistic way according to its nature, for the good of the patient, the healer and in some cases also the djinn itself.

Dr Nathan relates a case study concerning a child who becomes possessed by a djinn. The child is the identified patient, but in fact the symptoms relate to the parents’ problems with fitting into the host culture, as well as to the father’s past history, as a spiritually ‘pure’ man who was celibate for 40 years before marriage. The djinn possesses the boy when he starts school; in other words, when he enters into the foreign French society in which they live, and becomes therefore himself in some ways a foreigner, which makes him ‘impure’ culturally. (It’s notable that when the djinn possesses the boy, he insults his father in French, not in Arabic.) The djinn represents the otherness and impurity to which the father cannot adjust, and at the same she represents the solution to the problem, for the presence of the djinn takes the boy out of school and compels the family to return to tradition in order to treat the boy.

Treatment
Much of the treatment in ethnopsychiatry seems to consist in the patient being heard and understood by people who understand his or her language and culture. The normalization and validation, and the intrinsically healing effect of being mirrored within this containing relationship cannot be underplayed. Discussing the symptoms within the context of the client’s culture helps the client to constitute a meaning for the symptoms. This helps the patient to reinforce—or in the case of children of immigrants to create—their identity within their cultural framework. Which translates to a reinforcement or creation of his or her identity per se.

Sometimes however, the ethnopsychiatric team goes further, deliberately representing the patient’s problem to the patient in terms which it considers will most likely facilitate (re)construction of meaning, and subsequent healing. This is always done by taking into account not only the cultural interpretation of the symptoms, but also the key ways the culture itself is constituted. Example 2 shows how this is done.


Example 2: Drug addiction in a gypsy family

In gypsy (Roma) society one of the “basic cultural defense mechanisms lies in strengthening the cultural borders, constantly defining a limit between the inner and outer worlds”. Since the tribe moves continually, the culture is not held externally, but rather each individual holds the culture within them, and “is the guardian of the group’s soul”. Drug addiction is new in French gypsy society, and it threatens this system. Drugs come into gypsy society through the gadjé (mainstream house-dweller culture), and drug addiction is considered to be a sign of a kidnapped soul.

In the case of a young gypsy woman addicted to heroin, and rejected by her mother who considers her to have crossed over to the gadjé and to have become non-human, the ethnopsychiatry team points out to the mother and daughter that the drug problem is not part of gypsy culture. They then suggest that the problem is linked to the death of the grandmother, because since she died, the family has no longer been protected (magically). They do this based on their knowledge that gypsy culture is “organized on the basis of witchcraft logic, in which every individual is involved sooner or later, either as a victim or perpetrator of acts of witchcraft”.

The mother, it turns out, has long suspected that the mother of her gadjé daughter-in-law used witchcraft to attract her son. The team encourages the mother to follow the dead grandmother’s request that she go to church and pray regularly (this gypsy tribe is traditionally Christian). After this, the mother brings to them an object she has found, which is clearly a curse set by a member of the family.

The treatment has consisted in reducing the isolation both of the daughter within the family, and of the family within the culture, by reinserting both mother and daughter within the cultural belief system. The intervention has also set in motion various self-healing actions within the culture:
1. The evil was identified as coming from outside, from the gadjé, which activates the “closing-in response of the gypsy world”.
2. Drug-addicted people are seen as “kidnapped souls”, so the treatment has to follow that cultural meaning, and counterbalance the kidnapping. Identifying the cause of the addiction as a curse made by someone in the family restores agency to mother and daughter, who can now make meaning of the situation and resort to counter-curses to combat the drug addiction, within the system of the culture.

Conclusion
Ethnopsychiatry is a profoundly pragmatic practice, based on a structuralist analysis of meaning, the individual and society. It is similar to certain other strands of psychotherapy in that it considers a symptom to arise not from intra-psychic pathology, but rather to be the best and truest possible expression of a dis-ease that has a social or familial cause. Tobie Nathan, like James Hillman, believes that, “in cases of psychic disorder, the patient’s suffering expresses the deepest truth of his being.” And like Hillman he considers that “healing” the patient is an act of monotheistic aggression. Instead of analyzing the symptom and diagnosing it, ethnopsychiatry addresses it within its own (cultural) system of meaning.

Cultural Casebook: Still-Living Ancient Cultures

Wade Davis's book "The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World" is an utterly compelling, beautifully written series of pieces originally presented as lectures. Each piece describes a particular ancient culture that is still living, thriving and evolving today.

For example, the first chapter is about the ancient Polynesian art and science of long distance ocean navigation--using no instruments other than the perceptions, knowledge and experience of the human navigator, and the design of the canoe itself. The navigator does not sleep during the entire voyage, in order to keep the whole narrative of the voyage intact in his or her mind, using dead reckoning to know where he or she is now, in relation to the voyage up till now. By virtue of his or her ability to combine knowledge of the currents and waves, the travels of birds, the colours of the sea and the sky, the rising the setting of the stars, and a myriad of other natural data, the navigator positions the canoe on its voyage, and 'calls the islands up from the sea'.

By sharing his detailed, loving, knowledge about certain human civilisations, Davis implicitly and explicitly pleads for us to drop the Modernist fallacy that the "Western" secular, rational world view is the pinnacle of our development, and open our minds to entirely different--and one could say far superior--systems of conceiving of and interacting with the world. What matters, he says, is not which belief system is right or wrong per se, but rather "the potency of a belief, the manner in which a conviction plays out in the day-to-day lives of a people, for in a very real sense this determines the ecological footprint of a culture...[determining] both the actions of a people and the quality of their aspirations, the nature of the metaphors that propel them onward".

What metaphors propel you onward?

Here's an extract from the beginning of the book:

"Just to know that in the Amazon, Jaguar shaman still journey beyond the Milky Way, that the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, that the Buddhists in Tibet still pursue the breath of the Dharma is to remember the central revelation of anthropology: the idea that the social world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but rather is simply one model of reality, the consequence of one set of intellectual and spiritual choices that our particular cultural lineage made, however successfully, many generations ago.

"But whether we travel with the nomadic Penan in the forests of Borneo, a Vodoun acolyte in Haiti, a curandero in the high Andes of Peru, a Tamashek caravanseri in the red sands of the Sahara, or a yak herder on the slopes of Chomolungma, all these peoples teach us that there are other options, other possibilities, other ways of thinking and interacting with the earth. This is an idea that can only fill us with hope.

Together, the myriad of cultures makes up an intellectual and spiritual web of life that envelops the planet and is every bit as important to the well-being of the planet as the biological web of life that we know as the biosphere. You might think of this social web of life as the "ethnosphere", a term best defined as the sum total of all thoughts and intuitions, myths and beliefs, ideas and inspirations brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity's greatest legacy. It is the product of our dreams, the embodiment of our hopes, the symbol of all that we are and all that we, as a wildly inquisitive and astonishingly adaptive species, have created."

(The bolding is mine.)

Smile-Mask Syndrome

A new psychological syndrome is hitting headlines in Japan and neighbouring Asian countries. Named "smile-mask syndrome" by leading Osaka psychiatrist Makoto Natsume, the disorder primarily affects women in service industries whose jobs require them to smile all day. After a day of smiling, he says, these women find themselves increasingly unable to turn off the smile. Even devastating bad news can't wipe the inappropriate smile off their faces, much to their distress.

Dr Natsume predicts a national wave of mental illness including depression and other disorders as a result of women being forced to repress authentic emotions in order to wear a smile all day.

There may be another effect happening in addition to the repression of real feelings. According to the New York Times, "some researchers have tried to ... understand the states of mind that produce smiles. We think of them as signifying happiness, and indeed, researchers do find that the more intensely people contract their zygomaticus major muscles, the happier they say they feel. But this is far from an iron law. The same muscles sometimes contract when people are feeling sadness or disgust, for example."

So the wearer of the false smile may, paradoxically, be led to feel sad, by being forced to chronically contract the muscles required to produce smile.

Cultural Casebook: The Myth of American Innocence

Barry Spector's new book, Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence, has been ten years in the making. It's a wide-sweeping, provocative look at on American culture, from mythical, psychological and political perspectives, incorporating wisdom from ancient Greek traditions as well as from indigenous cultures in African and Central America.

Using the central image of the Ancient Greece god Dionysus, Barry looks at the archetype of the Other. According to Jungian psychology, the Other allows us to define ourselves by what we are not--defining Self by contrast with Other. Here in America, the ruling white (male) culture has historically defined itself by that which it is not--creating Others out of Native Americans, Black Americans, women, and most recently the Islamic world.

Barry adds an interesting extra layer of his own, defining the Inner Other and the Outer Other--others within the culture, and others without, and says this way of seeing ourselves and those around us grew from the very roots of the development of America, which combined a predatory world view, with a paranoid world view. His examination of American history and current foreign policy in light of all this is fascinating, and thought-provoking.

Refering to Ancient Greece, which venerated Apollo--god of reason, rationality, masculinity--Barry says the god Dionysus represented the Other, and held the shadow of the culture. But the Greeks gave room to Dionysus, in rites that celebrated sexuality, wildness--and grief. We in America, however, do not acknowledge our shadow, or allow the Other any humanity. Barry Spector's thesis is that this is because if we did, we would be pole-axed by grief at the reality of our 400 year history of oppression at home and abroad.

Instead, America lives by an unexamined myth of innocence. Our central myth has been created through 400 years of narratives about our need to defend ourselves against the dangerous Other. So without thinking about it, we believe we have a destiny of violent clashes with an evil enemy, in service of good and innocence. It's a myth of violent redemption, in which we play the role of savior. This myth hides the reality of American disenfranchisement, injustice, colonialism, and empire.

This short review doesn't come close to doing justice to the book. I urge you to read it. It's important, it's wise, and it makes you wonder about the unexamined stories you yourself live by, projecting them onto the world about you.

Cultural Casebook: Counter Culture Kids

I just found a small gem in my local library. Wild Child: Girlhoods in the Counterculture, is a collection of memoirs written by women who grew up in hippie families.

"Tofu casseroles, communes, clothing-optional kindergarten, antiwar protests — these are just a few of the hallmarks of a counterculture childhood. What became of kids who had been denied meat, exposed to free love, and given nouns for names? In Wild Child, daughters of the hippie generation speak about the legacy of their childhoods."

The stories, collected by Chelsea Cain, describe a winsome existence, all too often underpinned by insecurity, neglect, and even outright abuse. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand the childhoods of the current 40 - 50 somethings who grew up in the counter-culture of the 70's in California and elsewhere.

Finding The Feet: Connecting Immigrant Children With Their Lineage

Much of the work I do with elementary school children who are immigrants to the US is an attempt to help them reconnect with their lineage, healing the internal split between them and their ancestral culture, in order to forge a positive bi-cultural identity.

In doing this I am drawing not only on theoretical work, such as Tobie Nathan's ethnopsychiatry or the writings of Gloria Anzaldua on bilinguality/biculturality. But also, and more profoundly, on my own experience as a multiply-dislocated and bilingual child--experience which informs the field of the therapy, as well as the narrative of my life.

While I lived in France, as a bilingual adult, I had several experiences where a bilingual child between the ages of about five and nine, whose parents were both monolingual, would be introduced to me in either French or English. The child would politely ignore me, as children do grown ups, until at some point I spoke equally fluently in the other language. Suddenly the child would become very animated, want to talk to me, and in some cases literally follow me around for the rest of the day. After this happened a few times, I realised these children were the only bilingual people in their family. Bilingual-bicultural children need bilingual-bicultural role models so they can integrate the dual self into a unified bilingual-bicultural identity.

Children of immigrants are not only living between and across two cultures, but are also coping, to a greater or lesser extent, with the trauma of dislocation. Working with this trauma takes many forms. Usually I begin by simply opening a space to talk about where their grandparents are, how their parents came to this country, and the fact that they themselves have two cultures and languages inside them--framing all of this in an unambiguously positive light. For example, talking about how brave their parents were to walk all that way.

Case example
For a while I was seeing a five year old girl from El Salvador*, who was referred following a series of tantrums during which she threatened to call the police, so they would take her away from her home.

In our first session the client drew her family in the US, with great care, and with a lot of very carefully shaded colours. The people were perfectly drawn, with smiling faces, but they had no feet. Their unfinished legs hovered above the carefully drawn green line of the ground.

I asked where her grandparents were, and she said, "El Salvador". I acknowledged that El Salvador was far away, and asked if they were here in her heart, and she said yes. So I suggested she might want to add them to the picture too. She drew them in the top right hand corner, and I was astonished to see that they had feet, connecting directly to a new green grounding line.

The contrast between the US family, who were 'ungrounded', and the family members in El Salvador, who had a connection, quite literally, with the land, was striking. I felt that this marked a dislocation-related trauma, and that this was probably linked to the theme of being taken away, as evidenced in the child's threats to her parents. In control mastery terms, this child was trying to control who would be taken away and when.

In subsequent sessions of undirected play the client chose to draw her grandmother's house in El Salvador, and then to make a meal of tortillas out of Play Doh. "My mom taught me to make tortillas", she told me. "And her mom taught her."

I repeated this. "Your grandma taught your mom, and then your mom taught you." And then added that when she had a little girl, she could teach her too, and then her daughter could teach her daughter--marking the thread of her lineage and the possibility of its continuation in this new country.

Whatever the client chose to draw, we would label, and whenever we labelled anything, I would do the writing in both English and Spanish, always asking the client what the Spanish word was. For example, we wrote 'Grandma" and then we wrote "Abuelita". Every time I did this the client seemed surprised and delighted. My Spanish is rudimentary, but this was less important than my openness (particularly as a representative of the host culture) to the fact that there were two languages in our shared field, and that their worldviews are equally true and valid.

Conclusion
This work was all about creating feet--establishing a connection backwards to the land that had been lost, which in turn would enable a more grounded existence per se.

It's noteworthy that the immigration trauma was announced and investigated within the child's own self-directed play, and that she used the play to re-connect to her lineage and integrate the split within her internalised family.

Six weeks after the start of therapy, the teacher reported that the child's family had called to tell her the child's tantrums had stopped.

*Details have been changed to protect the client's confidentiality.