Steven Pinker, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. New York: Viking, 2007.

Steven Pinker is a figure who probably is already familiar to the International Psychoanalyisis community. He is the author of several books that unite linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and evolutionary theory. A good deal of hands-on clinical research, plus wide reading in several fields give his work credibility, even among those who (such as your faithful correspondent) disagree with him on key issues. His scientific credentials are impeccable: he was a math wiz as a kid in Canada, has held appointments at MIT as well as his current post at Harvard. It is nevertheless his gifts as a writer as much as his erudition that have won him a large audience: he has a genius for explaining complex ideas in terms any intelligent reader can grasp, without at the same time feeling he has been fed pap. Much of Pinker’s power as a writer derives from his ability to find telling and memorable examples drawn from life outside the academy. Among the graphs and diagrams in his books, you will find interspersed vignettes from Doonesbury or Dennis the Menace. Pinker is a world-class scholar of epithets, taboo words, and all manner of dirty talk. While there is no doubt a certain prurience in the evident relish with which he dishes up examples from the ghetto, barracks, and bedroom, they are always made to pay their way in illuminating some abstruse point about the nature of the psyche.
This book, his latest, should be of considerable interest to all those who are concerned with human nature, because it is a comprehensive argument about the role language plays in illuminating, abetting, stifling, and shaping our behavior. Pinker is a (critical) adherent of Chomsky’s argument that language is hard wired in human brains. Lacan’s argument that the UC is structured like a language is an intriguing idea that has never fully found a robust presence in clinical practice. Pinker provides a wealth of material to revisit the complex dialog between language, thought, and behavior.

Michael Holquist