The prolific author of this important, engaging book died just before it appeared. Born in Prague, 1927, Louis Berger had degrees in engineering, music,  physics, and clinical psychology (Ph.D., U. Tennessee). His interests–and previous books–include psychotherapy, substance abuse, statistics, language and philosophy. His first career was as a cellist in the Boston Symphony.

          The book consists of  three chapters on language and five on psychopathology, sanity and parenting. The bibliography lists over 150 sources. A sprinkling of typographical errors indicates that Berger died before the proof pages were done. The price–$90–is high for a book of 185 pages. There is one illustration (frontispiece), a page from a Beethoven string quartet. Besides language, major topics include child development, madness (cultural), and technology. The most quoted sources are Walter Ong, American priest, historian, philosopher (1912-2003) and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

          “Sociocultural psychopathology” sums up the malignancy that Berger diagnoses, alluding to Sigmund Freud, Erich Fromm, Christofer Lasch, and Joel Kovel. To begin, he cites Wittgenstein on our unawareness of things simple and familiar  “the distance of the near,” and Heidegger on the dullness and distortions of common sense. All this and what Berger calls “vertiginous reflexivity” complicate linguistic inquiry. He introduces and employs linguistics: semantics, syntax, and grammar, from Descartes to Wittgenstein, Quine and Chomsky. Berger emphasizes discontinuities: “The patterns of intelligence, learning, emotional life and so on are distinctly different for each phase of childhood. … Growth is fundamental transformation.” (38) He effectively makes us aware of the marvel–and the puzzle–of language acquisition.

          Cited at length, linguist Walter Ong considers the period before human literacy as primary orality (p-orality). Berger notes the limitations of our understanding of the transition into language. We can only speculate. This void is, like the neonatal state, ineffable, i.e. cannot be expressed. The discussion proceeds to the change from orality to literacy, with its apparent change in emotional climate–from speech to text, warm to cold. Berger addresses subjective experience and consciousness studies:

          There, almost without exception the focus is on the brain and its activity–a comforting, simplifying, and very likely simplistic reduction. Psychology and subjectivity enter by the back door usually by conflating the languages of subjective experience and of neural biochemical events… Observing one’s ‘qualia’ is not quite like observing trees. … That, plus the problem of the ontology of language, is the problem of experiencing it in a nutshell. (p. 70)

           Subsequent chapters address the pathology of “humanity’s madness” emphasizing interpersonal relations and the immediate present. “I will argue that there could be ways in which the initially sane infant steps into language and remains sane.” (82) His solution is to change our understanding of self, language, and world,  to face real dangers and confront the madness that derives from literacy. He objects to the idea that science is neutral, and takes as a corrective model the Piraha Amazon tribe, with its p-oral way of life, their resistance to abstraction, and the distortions of  literacy. He lauds Bryan Appleyard’s Understanding the Present: An Alternative History of Science (2004) and Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2012). This is Berger’s model of sanity and the way to save the world.

© 2015 E. James Lieberman

E. James Lieberman, M.D., Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Emeritus, George Washington University School of Medicine