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It is not language but speech that is claimed as the subject matter of psychology. Psychoanalysis represents the most important projects to investigate speech. In this paper, the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan is given priority. He explicitly incorporated the social sphere into psychoanalysis by ways of putting the speaking subject in the center of social theory reflexions. Lacan's discourse in this article becomes the discourse of the media and as such represents the post-democracy and the unfolding of the discourse of power. As such, subjectification becomes understandable as defrayment of the paroles of the discourse of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on recent developments within the field of discursive psychology that integrate the works of Bakhtin, the present paper discusses the dialogical self with regard to early infancy research. It draws on examples from a comparative study of mother-infant interactions among North German middle class families and Cameroonian Nso to illustrate the potential of a dialogical approach to language and self for developmental psychology and to demonstrate empirical ways of studying child development from this perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at the potential of language to change social structures and conditions. I reconstruct Judith Butler's concept of a language's performativity and present recent examples which show the inherent potential of language and its effects on a society if people use their language in specific ways and therewith actively shape their social surroundings. I demonstrate how Butler uses Louis Althusser's model of interpellation, John L. Austin's theory of performative speech acts and Jacques Derridas concepts of iteration, différance and the event to formulate her own concept of language and society. It will become manifest that she can analytically include both stability and dynamics as characteristic elements of societies. Language as the constitutive element both for changes of social conditions and for their (temporal) stabilization is understood as an active means for performing these transformations and stabilizations. Thus, a genuine emancipatory and critical potential which can be conceptualized with Butler's concept of performativity is inherent in language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]