ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses some of the key theoretical aspects of language development and usage, laying the groundwork for an understanding of its power in creating the psychotherapy truths inherent in the diagnostic labels and other psychotherapeutic constructs that inform the mental health professions. Language, in the classical view, is factual in that it corresponds to a natural order in the world. Language contains categories that organize our experiences in the world. Categorization begins at the level of distinctive action, at the level which is learned earliest, and at the level in which things are first named. Language has enormous power to shape and control meaning. Social discourse, in defining what is right and wrong, good and bad, feminine and masculine, moral and immoral, ensures compliance with normative behaviors and explains deviations from and exceptions to normative behaviors. As we all carry social discourse in our heads, we all also carry our own internalized social control agents.
