Zum Verhältnis zwischen medikalen und sprachzentrierten Diskursen

The separation of medicine on the one hand and language-centered sciences and practices on the other is generally accepted as a logical consequence of their (supposedly) different methods and objects of investigation. In reality, however, this distinction is the result of a historical development process: the differentiation of human knowledge into various specialized discursive orders dating back to the “saddle period” around 1800. This article aims to illustrate the historical relativity of this separation by highlighting some paradigmatic interrelations between the expertise of medicine and that of language, namely the medical-poetological concept of catharsis, the curriculum of the artes liberales, the genre of the didactic poem and the psychoanalytic talking cure and anamnetic hermeneutics.