The weakness of words, speaking in tongues, and bridging language and reality

It has long been conjectured that the way we think, feel, and view the world is determined by the language we use. This has come to be known as the Whorfian hypothesis. In putting forth a strong version of this hypothesis, the philosopher of language and science, Alfred Korzybski wrote, “We do not realize what tremendous power the structure of an habitual language has. It is not an exaggeration to say that it enslaves us through the mechanism of semantic reactions and that the structure which a language exhibits, and impresses upon us unconsciously, is automatically projected upon the world around us.” In other words, it is through language that we form and know ourselves, and that we are restricted in seeing the world due to the categories and divisions entailed in imposing our language upon the world. Korzybski characterized the unbridgeable experiential chasm between words and reality in his famous statement, “the map is not the territory.” This dilemma seems to beg the question, “Is there any way around language locking us into ways of seeing and being in the world?”

There is something inherently difficult in attempting to use language to understand language. It brings to mind one of the pet sayings of the author and philosopher, Alan Watts. That is, that using language to understand language is like “chewing your own teeth.” Nonetheless, progress can be made. As a start, it might be worthwhile to gain insight from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. Rather than the acquisition of a series of mechanical, one to one associations of words to things, Wittgenstein pointed to the fact that language grows in the process of a living organism using words, not simply matching words to things. Words have significance beyond mere connections to things. They have emotional, social and physiological aspects. The meaning of a word, per se, is merely a contributor to the word’s overall impact. 

Although words have meanings, the ways they are used can convey information beyond their specific meaning. If you want to make a graduating high school student feel proud, you might say, “Congratulations you did it!” However, if you wanted to insult an experienced airline pilot who just landed the plane on a clear and lovely spring day, you might also say, “Congratulations, you did it!” Some words, the onomatopoeias, offer meaning by their very sound. They are the buzz of a bee, the achoo of a sneeze, or the kerplunk of a stone thrown into a pond. In some cases, sounds within words offer something beyond the definition of the word. In Neil Simon’s play, The Sunshine Boys, the character Willy Clark, a cranky, old, out-of-work vaudevillian comedian notes, “Alka Seltzer is funny. You say “Alka Seltzer” you get a laugh. Words with “k” in them are funny. Casey Stengel, that’s a funny name. Robert Taylor is not funny . . . Then, there’s chicken. Chicken is funny. Pickle is funny.”  The ways various languages sound when spoken also tend to evoke different feelings, ostensibly in both speakers and listeners. Some languages are experienced as harsh and guttural, whereas others are soft and resonant. These differences, apart from the denotations of the words, carry information and meaning. In regards to such differences, the polyglot Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, is said to have declared, “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.”

We use words to think and communicate our thoughts with others. But sounds, volume, speed, inflection, voice modulation, and accompanying hand and body gestures can carry information beyond exact meanings of words. There are also ways that people use what only seem to be words to slip between words and express themselves when words fail. In the scat singing of jazz masters, such as Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, nonsense syllables are sung with poetic rhythms that make words unnecessary. They expressed joy, playfulness, and irony in utterances without any discernible meanings.  The music critic, Will Friedwald, wrote that Louis Armstrong’s scatting, “has tapped into his own core of emotion, releasing emotions so deep, so real that they are unspeakable; his words bypass our ears and our brains and go directly for our hearts and souls.”

In the context of utterances that make no sense yet carry great power, it is of interest to consider glossolalia, or “speaking in tongues.” This is the spontaneous expression of language-like sounds that the speakers themselves do not understand or have previous experience in voicing. This practice is important in certain sects of Christian belief, particularly the Pentecostals. However, anthropologists tell us of speaking in tongues by oracles, shamans and religious figures in dozens of cultures through history and across the world. Thus, it appears to be a common behavior and thus likely a useful accessory to human existence.

Speaking in tongues is seen by Christian believers as evidence of being filled with the Holy Spirit. It is primarily the passage of Acts 2:4 in the New Testament that prompts believers to accept the divine nature of speaking in tongues. It reads: “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” Literal interpretations lead to the belief that these are genuine, full, and complete languages, albeit possibly none that anyone has ever heard or spoken before. However, despite the fervency of the belief in speaking in tongues being a divine gift of full-fledged languages, formal linguistic analyses have suggested otherwise. The anthropologist and linguist, Dr. William J. Samarin from the University of Toronto, describes speaking in tongues in more mundane fashion as, “. . . meaningless but phonologically structured human utterance, believed by the speaker to be a real language but bearing no systematic resemblance to any natural language, living or dead.” Indeed, if one listens to recordings of praying in tongues, one hears a lot of repetition of a limited number of simple, one syllable sounds, often with a flourish of a multisyllabic sounds at the end. Some well-practiced individuals can alter the string of sounds and add variety to the speaking in tongues, but it doesn’t take the educated ear of a linguist to realize that what is being uttered is not language with specific meaning.   However, this does not rule out the possibility that it offers meaning through the mere utterance of it.

Speaking in tongues is associated with deep religious fervor and ecstatic feelings of closeness to God. There is also social significance of the ability to speak in tongues. It allows one to be recognized as a bona fide member of the religious community. Less study has been devoted to its purely psychological significance. The first major consideration was likely that by the Canadian psychologist, Dr. George Barton Cutten, in his 1927 book, Speaking with Tongues: Historically and Psychologically Considered. His overall impression was that the tendency to speak in tongues arose from psychopathology. He concluded that those who spoke in tongues were verbally incompetent, low in intelligence, and both mentally and socially under-developed. Subsequent investigations by other psychologists led to the same general conclusion. However, more recent research shows that those who speak in tongues are no more prone to psychopathology than any other group. Indeed, a 1995 study—published in The Journal of Pentecostal Studies, but performed using standard psychological research methods—found men and women entering the Pentecostal ministry that spoke in tongues exhibited no psychotic traits and fewer neurotic traits than can be found in the general public.  In a recent study—a Doctoral Dissertation in Psychology by a religious woman who strived to used standard techniques of assessing mood and formal statistical analyses—it was found that subjects who engaged in speaking in tongues at least twice a week had significantly better mood than those who did not. Along with that, there have been numerous reports throughout the literature of cathartic experiences and emotional release during sessions of speaking in tongues. Even the skeptic, Dr. Cutten, acknowledged that.  

Clearly, “praying in tongues” can offer psychological benefits.  Indeed, a person’s inability or aversion to use words to express certain demands or desires, or to convey the nature of their personal, existential conflicts—perhaps traumas that occurred to them before they had words—may make spontaneously invented vocalizations a unique and useful pathway for emotional expression. Interestingly, the Bible alludes to such a pathway of expression. In Romans 26, it is written, “Likewise the Spirit also helpeth our infirmities. For we know not what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit itself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered.” However, it is of interest to consider if the power of speaking in tongues can be lifted from the religious and sociocultural contexts and harnessed for more purely psychotherapeutic purposes. Indeed, while speaking in tongues most often takes place in a religious context, the performance does not appear to require it. Rather, evidence shows that speaking in tongues is merely one more learned behavior that can be attained and perfected through training. MRI studies have shown that individuals long-practiced and adept in speaking in tongues exhibit specific changes in their brains. Specifically, this is increased grey matter volume in the left frontal pole and right middle frontal areas. This, in turn, is interpreted as changes supporting the ability to suppress “normal speech” during the production of utterances more typical of speaking in tongues.  Thus, the ability to speak in tongues is likely related to the skills of improvisation in jazz and theater.

Communications from mysterious channels through obscure mechanisms, have not been entirely ignored by mainstream, secular psychology. Carl Jung, Théodore Flournoy, and other luminaries of the early psychoanalytic movement saw phenomena such as glossolalia, Jungs’ method of  active imagination, automatic writing, and even mediumship as useful pathways for exploration of the unconscious mind. Interestingly, in describing  active imagination, Jung noted, “The training consists first of all in systematic exercises for eliminating critical attention, thus producing a vacuum in consciousness.”  Thus, the common feature shared by the various methods of allowing unconscious material to rise unfettered into awareness is the ability to release one’s self from the usual censoring mechanisms of the frontal lobe.

One of the few contemporary souls audacious enough to consider the use of speaking in tongues as a mind-expanding, and thus psychotherapeutic, technique is philosopher Patrick William Jemmer of Northumbria University. The flavor of his vision can be appreciated in the introduction to one of his monographs. He wrote, “The Enchant Newcastle Monograph seeks to investigate a “Psycho-chaotic Semiotics” with which to unite creatively the analytical mathematics of chaos and complexity with the fluxional semiotic study of human meaning-making into an overarching theory of human psychological creativity which enables us all to become essendi incantatores,  šamánes faciendi,  lingwiz’ds of is, techneglossists, and knack-smiths of reality.” His use of language pays homage to literary giants such as James Joyce. It harkens to the power and poetry inside invented words. Indeed, while reminiscent of psychotic loose association, his half-poetic, half philosophical exercise in allowing speaking in tongues to be part of a “psycho-chaotic semiotic” process of mind expansion is both joyful and purposeful. 

Words are often blunt instruments. They only point towards the truth. They do not necessarily capture it. When words fail, it might be worthwhile to spontaneously invent language that, through its sound, cadence, volume, inflection, and feel of the mouth, throat and tongue, unearths the non-verbal, pre-verbal, buried, inaccessible, inexpressible feelings that yet call for expression and exploration. In courageous, expanded versions, a secular speaking in tongues could be a verbal counterpart to chaotic meditation in its various forms—a practice of spontaneous expression of emotion, singing, dancing, and moving in wild abandon. It could be a part of living out the primitive and primal to find release—a brother to Walt Whitman’s “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.” Adventurous therapists, take note.