Inc. The Symposium was co-sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry, University of Illinois, Chicago, and the Abraham A. Low Institute.
Human beings are the only creatures on earth that can talk themselves into trouble.
This statement, from a recent book on communication theory, reflected the perspective which I hoped, in my original paper, to bring to Abraham Low's original work on language and Recovery. The first of these tasks involved little effort to discover how much Low's work both reflected and anticipated modern thinking on the subject. Low's noteworthy contribution came in evolving this mainstream approach to language into a practical system of self-help techniques. The pressure in the head is viewed as due to a brain tumor. While such judgments may be appropriate in rare circumstances, Low emphasizes that his patients far too often are in the habit of allying them to the trivialities of everyday life-with the result that such judgmental language habits interact with the symptomatic idiom to create a corrosive anger and fear, destructive of a sense of security and mental health.