Word Assocations

[steepholm]

I've been trying to catch up with the TLS, and last night was taken with one their occasional "Then And Now" features. In this case it was reprinting an article first published in 1918 on the subject of "Jung and Word Association". It was an interesting piece altogether, but what leapt out at me was the following sentence:

The book also contains material of great value for comparing the average reactions of the uneducated with those of the mentally deficient; there are probably very many cases in which the defective represents, not the sins of his fathers or a freak of nature, but a failure of our present civilization to provide the educational opportunities that would give expression to the more unusual, and perhaps not the less valuable, types of mind.

I found it quite hard to process the fact that such un-PC language was being used to make what is, if one can press on to the end of the sentence, such an enlightened thought. To pick only the most obvious problem, was the writer really unaware of the problems involved in describing someone as a defective while also maintaining that their minds may be just as valuable as anyone else's? Did they really have such a tin ear? Or is it our own generation that, having thought so much about the ways in which privilege and prejudice are embedded in language, is unusually sensitive to such matters? (Or has our insensitivity simply moved to different spheres less visible to us, for future generations to hoot and tut at?)

Comments

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

I don't find the language that surprising, now that I've reread and noticed the 1918 date. (First read was pretty shocking!) Hell, when I was teaching high school equivalency exam prep classes, a middle-aged woman came to us to take the exam because in school she'd been put with the other 'retarded' students doing tasks like mimeographing worksheets for the students instead of being educated. This solely because she'd had a hare-lip. She was no more mentally deficient than I am (on a good day! I'm pretty damn defective on others), but retarded, defective, all that kind of language had been fairly common not that long before. Yes, yes, this is anecdotal, but the other teachers and counselor were only shocked that she was so bright and had been treated like this, rather than disbelieving of the story.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's not the use of terms such as 'defective' that surprised me (pretty standard for 1918, as you say), it's the fact that it turns up in a sentence that is, by implication, questioning whether such people are defective in any way. It was that juxtaposition, and its apparent invisibility to the writer, that brought me up short.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not sure it *is* questioning whether they're defective in any way. They are 'defective' in that they're lacking the abilities necessary to participate fully in society - it's just that their education (or rather lack of same) is seen to be what has left them in such a state. 'Disabled' sounds a hell of a sight better, but it's not that different fundamentally, is it? Not that I'm pushing for a return to the use of 'mentally defective', you understand!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I read it differently and much more relativistically. The way I see this part of the sentence ("a failure of our present civilization to provide the educational opportunities that would give expression to the more unusual, and perhaps not the less valuable, types of mind"), it's not calling for "defectives" to be allowed to go to school like everyone else, so much as saying that society is set up to cater for one particular sort of mind (which for reasons of numbers we call "normal") rather than another sort of mind (which we have been calling "defective"), and that in order to give the latter group the educational opportunities that suit them, we need to cater to the particular qualities of their minds, rather than see every point at which they differ from the "norm" as a kind of deficit.

Now, maybe I'm wrong in seeing that fairly radical view in this sentence, but if I'm right then I just find it interesting that the writer is nevertheless happy to use "defective" as a term.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

You may perhaps be reading it a bit more radically than it merits, but I still think you're over-reacting to the 'defective'. And why don't you say the same every time someone uses the words 'disabled' or 'disability' now? As I was telling you about the woman from the OU who called and basically said that they wanted to 'cater to the particular qualities of their minds' (or not 'their', but 'her', obviously), I was hugely impressed with the mindset which viewed people with mental illnesses as their own best experts. But that phone conversation still happened because B had checked a box saying she had a disability rather than an otherability or something. Maybe in 50 or 100 years people will be shocked to read about her ticking a box with that wording too, but I'm not sure B would even be willing to entertain the thought of using a term like an 'otherability' to describe bipolar disorder!

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

In what way over-reacting? I'd fully expect someone in 1918 to be using that kind of language, as I said above. But yes, I can well imagine that in 50 or 100 years people will be shocked to find a box with "disability" on it - which is sort of what I was hinting at, in general terms, at the end of the post.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

I know that you were suggesting that at the end of the post, but what I was saying is that B. now thinks it's ridiculous that anyone should consider the word 'disability' describing her bipolar offensive. She was also talking about the word 'retarded' or 'retard' as fjm said - it's offensive because of its misuse rather than its actual meaning, which is merely descriptive.

I think the completely right-on view that 'other than the norm' is *not* the same as inferior can at its extreme end lead to a tendency to blame 'society' for everything. Try telling B that the only problem she has is that society isn't able to mould itself to her fluctuations in brain chemicals and see if she reacts well to it. Of course many people need to know and understand more about mental illnesses, but it wouldn't make bipolar disorder less a disorder or solve the many problems it brings.

Similarly, the people who were most unhappy in our adult ed. classes were those who saw that nearly everyone around them was smarter than they were and could see a goal that might just about be possible (whether it was learning to read or passing the GED exam) but not actually achieve it. In many cases society had let them down in a variety of ways, but in others, that just wasn't the case. No matter how valuable their many other abilities were, they wanted to have more intellectual abilities or they wouldn't have been coming to the classes, and I think would have been pretty bloody irritated to have someone as intelligent as you telling them they had no deficiency or disability just because they were differently intellectually gifted.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I think would have been pretty bloody irritated to have someone as intelligent as you telling them they had no deficiency or disability just because they were differently intellectually gifted.

And quite right too, because that would be to introduce an equal and opposite dogmatism. What Jung (or the reviewer describing Jung) is doing isn't that, I don't think. He's describing an attitude that's open to the possibility of minds working in different ways, and therefore needing different kinds of descriptors and measures in order to be accounted for properly. So, IQ tests or GED exams will measure one thing, perhaps, but if we apply only at the criteria that appear salient when studying "normal" people, then we are likely to miss something. I don't think that at all implies that he (or I!) is telling people without legs that they can win the high jump if they just "try hard enough", or that their problems aren't real problems, etc, etc.

[deborah]

I really do think this is it -- the comparison with you and fjm bring up with "disabled". Right now, in this time and place, "person with disabilities" has become the most common, disability community-approved way of referring to people with disabilities. (Insert obligatory disclaimer here about there being no such thing as the "disability community", and there being a huge subset of people with disabilities who feel no such thing.) But in the future, as you say, steepholm, there will be a combination of changes in language which DO herald changes in attitude, and changes in language which DON'T herald change in attitude, and the end result will be that the word "disability" looks horrendous.

For example, I strongly believe that in the future, I very much suspect that people will be horrified that once autistics were thought of as people with cognitive disabilities, instead of as people with different cognitive processing skills which need to be accommodated in different ways. That will be in attitudinal shift in society.

But at the same time, society will have moved to thinking of the word "disability" as being associated with some kind of horrific treatment ("do you know that people who couldn't walk used to be pushed around in its horrible wheel Victorian contraptions? They were so cruel back then, before they had hoverchairs"), and people who have exactly the same attitudes will think it is horribly evil to use the word "disabled".

In other words, I think that your (steepholm's) shock over the paragraph comes to a certain extent from a disruption of our comfortable beliefs that the changes in language reflect attitudinal changes, but they don't as much as we want to believe.

[lady-schrapnell.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Autism is an example which brings up a lot of the complexities in this whole discussion - in part I suppose because of the huge variation in people at different ends of the spectrum. A friend's brother was severely autistic, and viewing him as having merely different cognitive processing skills really doesn't work as it does for someone at the Asperger's end of the spectrum.

In terms of an attitudinal shift, I wonder whether another possibility might be that some mental illnesses might be viewed as disabilities or defects but the attitude towards having a brain which handles its chemicals defectively isn't at all loaded? Personally I'd be happy saying my brain kind of conked out on the fighting off depression front and yes, it's not working right now without antidepressants, and therefore it's defective. And what of it? Rather than trying to change the language to avoid saying it's anything about my brain which is in any way 'wrong', it's to view that defect as no more significant than the same brain's migraineiness. But it has exactly as little to do with society's inability to accommodate those differences/defects in each case. (Granted, my depression is far from being a major disability, but I've worn out B's willingness to okay every comment which mentions her atm!)

[deborah]

see, I used autism very intentionally, because as technology improves it's become increasingly clear that many people with extremely severe autism really are incredibly intelligent (not in the Rainman savant sense), but communicate differently from neurotypicals -- so very differently that it seems like communication is impossible. And suddenly in the last few years the technology that enables neurotypical and autistics to communicate is becoming available.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

It's an interesting question as to which leads the way, language change heralding changes in attitude, or vice versa. Both, I guess, at various times and places. The example I gave shows an attitude changing, but the language lagging behind, and I just wondered whether that's likely to happen less in an age when various movements from "political correctness" to advertising have made us hyper-aware of the rhetorical power of terminology. But maybe not. "Disabled" has already been mentioned, but I was thinking about "person of colour" the other day, which as far as I can see is the designation of choice in large parts of the internet, but which I've always instinctively fought shy of because it "normalizes" being white. That bothers me, but I don't remember hearing the objection being made elsewhere, and don't feel it's my place to make myself, other than musing on my own LJ of course. (For all that, I'm sure it has been made.)

[deborah]

my general rule is to use the language that the community in question chooses to use to describe itself. As far as "people of color", I have seen people talk about how it makes whiteness normative, but I think it is currently considered to be a more positive description the negative descriptions of "nonwhite", "minority", etc.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Yes, that seems the only rule that makes practical sense. As for "nonwhite" and "minority", they're even worse - the first normalizing whiteness even more blatantly, and the second being simply untrue (most people aren't white, after all).

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Thinking about it, the problem is perhaps more structural, in that the very fact that we feel the need to have a word to describe people who aren't white implies a specialness about whiteness that's not going to be erased by the choice of one term over another. Of course, many groups have words to describe people who aren't members of their own group (e.g. goy) but they tend to be used by the group themselves rather than as self-descriptors by the people to whom they're applied. Arguably it's a sign of white-normativity that people who aren't white feel the need to find a term to describe their own non-whiteness.

This comes out of a conversation with Lady_S last night in which I found myself asking what, say, a blind person, a person in a wheelchair and a person with bipolar have in common, apart from being expected to tick the 'Disabled' box on forms. Since their circumstances and the help they may require are all quite different, what is the point of grouping them under a general label, other than to reinforce the normative position of people without those conditions?

NB There may be very good answers to those questions, but I've not thought of them yet!

[fjm.livejournal.com]

defective was a medical term just as moron referred to a very specific band of the Stanford Binet scale.

Language changes, and whatever terms one uses, if the attitudes are negative the new terms quicky acquire the same connotations. "Remedial" was a term intended to reassure students that their difficulties wuld be remedied.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Whatever the scientific uses to which it was put, "defective" certainly implies a lack vis-a-vis "normal" people. Science is of course far from immune to enshrining the assumptions of its practitioners in its vocabulary.

However, what surprised me here is that, even though the term is negative the attitude being expressed isn't. It's the mismatch between the two that struck me.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

Handicapped
Disabled
Impaired


All words used in the past twenty years, all in association with a similar mismatch.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

Well, quite. All these terms, like "defective", imply an unflattering comparison with "normal" people. They're all examples of negative attitudes, if you like. That kind of language is very familiar, but what this article is actually saying (if I read it right - see my answer to Lady_S above) is radically anti-normative. That's why it's interesting (to me, anyway) that the writer feels no apparent discomfort using normative language in order to stake out an anti-normative position.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

My point is that this was not unusual. It is, in many ways, the histoical norm. Most researchers and innovators who invented these terms were concerned to enhance the situation of people in the category. What happened in the classroom and in institutions and in policy, was a different matter altogether.

IQ tests for example were originally intended to allow students who were struggling to be assisted. They were not intended to label or to divide, as they have since been used.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree with any of that, but "defective" certainly isn't being coined by the writer here. If anything, what I was trying to point to was the kind of accumulation of anomalies you get just prior to a paradigm shift, but expressed here in terms of anomalous terminology rather than data. The writer has inherited the discourse of "defective", and is using it even as he sketches out an alternative with which it is incompatible. What intrigues me is the lack of any apparent sense that it is incompatible.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I see the cognitive dissonance you're struck by, but I also find Lady Schrapnell's response to make sense. The writer is too busy challenging the idea to be worried about challenging the common language of the time.

What strikes me as most interesting is that, if I understand the general import of the quotation, is that "defective" is being used as a blanket term to cover two states mentioned earlier: "uneducated" and "mentally deficient". As "mentally deficient" in this context does mean what we think it means, it's easier to see "defective" as being used by intent as a neutral term: it's defective, but we're not prejudging why it's defective.

Even today, the difference between ignorance and stupidity is often hard to discern.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure: I'd assumed that the word "defective" was being applied only to those considered "mentally deficient", but you may be right. The context, by the way, is a study the ways that different groups of people react to word association tests - which includes not only what words they respond with, but the time elapsed before they respond, and so on. The article has just noted that there is a stronger correlation between the degree of education than there is between sex. Then comes the passage I quoted.

[sheenaghpugh]

The writer is too busy challenging the idea to be worried about challenging the common language of the time.

Yup. I think he's using "defective" fairly loosely, but with no worries because the language of that day was breathtakingly blunt. I have a Sears & Roebuck from that time which I treasure for the page titled, not "Intimate Apparel for the Fuller Figure" but "Underwear for Fat People".

The only thing that surprises me is, as you say, the novel if tentative thought that people who weren't normally intelligent might have something else of value. I've got a marriage guidance manual from the 1920s that states bluntly "The birth of an idiot is the greatest affliction that can befall any home", and a book of Norwegain folk tales from the 60s (!) that says much the same thing in the same language.

I do think though that we go a bit too far the other way. I know a friend once told me she had problems fund-raising for people with learning difficulties, and it didn't surprise me, because until she told me otherwise, I thought that meant people who couldn't quite get the hang of algebra - I didn't realise it might be people who had trouble learning their own addresses. If you get totally euphemistic, you may obscure the fact that there is actually a problem...

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

"Underwear for Fat People" - love it! Life was so much simpler then...

I'm not a big fan of euphemism either: it can very often be the flip side of contempt. After all, if someone perceives the need for a euphemism it's usually because whatever it is is seen as lesser in some way. "We know that X really is less valuable than Y, but we don't want to hurt X's feelings by saying so, so we'll make up a special word to disguise it." Whereas this passage is saying, don't leap to conclusions, there may be more here than will appear if you look at it only the way you've been used to do.