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 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.