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

[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.