The unconscious and the social in Saussure

Dados Bibliográficos

ID3955085
AutoresJohn E Joseph (0000-0002-7780-8265, University of Edinburgh, autor correspondente)
Ano2000
Volume27
Fascículo2-3
Páginas307-334
Data de publicação2000-10-17
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessNão
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoHistoriographia Linguistica (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0302-5160 • E-ISSN: 1569-9781
EditoraJohn Benjamins Publishing Company (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1075/hl.27.2.09jos
OpenAlexW2163900549
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas6
Referências citadas13

Saussure stood between two figures, Whitney and Meillet, each of whom was relentlessly opposed to the dominant psychological establishment of his time. Saussure himself was much more ambivalent about psychology, never portraying it as standing in clear opposition to the interests of linguistics or sociology as the others did. Yet among the many changes that took place in his general linguistics courses between the First in 1907 and the Second in 1908-1909 was a withdrawal from the topic that was at the heart of the Neogrammarian psychology of language, analogy. With it came withdrawal from all but a few psychological considerations, and a proportionate increase in the number of sociological ones. In particular, the role of the unconscious mind in insulating language from deliberate change was taken over by the force of the social group. The timing of this shift coincides with that of the publication of Sechehaye (1908), inspired by Saussure and dedicated to him by his colleague and former student, and the abrupt dismissal of the book by Saussure's friend and confidante Meillet as being entirely psychological with no interest in or for sociology. Saussure shared many of Meillet's concerns about the autonomy of linguistic science, and his shift from the psychological to the social may have been more directly motivated by Meillet's reactions than has been generally recognised - not least because Meillet would later portray the direction of influence as flowing unilaterally from Saussure to himself, as a way of securing Saussure's posthumous authority for his ongoing programmatic calls for a sociologically-based linguistics

Ambivalence · Analogy · Autonomy · Dismissal · Epistemology · Opposition (politics · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Reflexive pronoun · Sociology · Unconscious mind · Historical Linguistics and Language Studies · Law · Linguistics and Discourse Analysis · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology · Spanish Linguistics and Language Studies