The Psycholinguistics of Self-Talk in Logic-Based Therapy: Using a Toolbox of Philosophical Antidotes to Overcome Self-Destructive Speech Acts

This article discusses the nature of self-talk, characterizing it as a psycholinguistic activity consisting of the performance of speech acts directed to oneself. More specifically, it examines negative speech acts as embedded in behavioral and emotional reasoning, the performance of which creates behavioral and emotional disturbances for the agent, such as anxiety, depression, guilt, and anger. This characterization has important implications for psychotherapy, namely, that helping clients to identify these speech acts and replacing them with ones that have antidotal properties can be therapeutic. According to Logic-Based Therapy (LBT), a popular form of philosophical counseling, cardinal or key self-destructive speech acts can be counteracted by uplifting philosophical speech acts when the latter resonate with clients. This means that philosophical psychotherapies, such as LBT, can potentially have significant therapeutic value. Based on this premise, this article introduces and discusses an AI-generated “Toolbox” of philosophical antidotes created by the Institute for Logic-Based Therapy and Consultation in the United States to help clients find suitable, resonant philosophical antidotes to their self-destructive speech acts.