Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2002, 47, 359–382

To speak in tongues:
language, diversity and psychoanalysis
Angela Connolly, Rome

Abstract: After reviewing the different psychoanalytical approaches to language of

authors such as Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Jung and Nicolas Abraham, the author exam-
ines the problem of ‘analytical listening’, of the attitude that every analyst must assume
towards the words of the analysand, words that must be heard not just in terms of their
content but above all in terms of their sound. We live in a culture in which visual images
predominate over acoustic images and all too often this cultural trend is repeated in
analysis, but it is only when we can hear the ‘poetry’ of the analysand’s discourse that
we are able to provide an ‘echo’, an analytical response that can co-symbolize with, that
can offer to the analysand a word or a metaphor that will unlock the symbol hidden
behind his or her words. The author then turns to the problem of bilinguism and its role
in analysis. In her view, bilingual analysts are facilitated in their task of listening and
of translation, because bilinguism facilitates the rapidity and fluidity of the analyst’s
associations, and at the same time sharpens his or her awareness of how the sound of a
word can subtly change its meaning. The paper ends with a clinical vignette which illus-
trates the role that language can play in hysteria. In hysteria the dissociation between body
and psyche is accompanied by a dissociation inside language itself, between verbalization
and vocalization. These dissociations can be linked to the traumatic impact of the encounter
between the ‘language of tenderness’ and the ‘language of passion’, between the child’s
attachment needs and parental sexuality. In such cases the failure of communication can
be resolved principally through the use the analyst makes of the countertransference.

Key words: analytical psychology, bilinguism, diversity, language, poetry, signs, symbols,
words.

David Crystal (2000) in Language Death has calculated that, if there are
approximately 6000 different languages spoken in the world today, half of
these will have disappeared in the next twenty or thirty years. Already 95%
of the world’s population speak either Chinese, English, Hindi, Spanish or
Russian. We might be tempted to look positively at this development and to see
in it a new possibility of improving the dialogue between the different peoples
of the earth, but we must not forget that with these languages, there also
disappear traditions, myths and knowledge, a whole way of looking at and
creating the world. Paradoxically, exactly the opposite seems to be happening
in the psychoanalytical community. In his 1988 opening address to the IPA

0021–8774/2002/4703/359 © 2002, The Society of Analytical Psychology

Published by Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
360 Angela Connolly

Montreal Congress, Wallerstein (1990) centred his attention on the increasing

psychoanalytical diversity, referring to what he calls ‘a pluralism of theoretical
perspectives, of linguistic and thought conventions, of distinctive regional,
cultural and language emphases’. Hovering over and under Wallerstein’s
apparent acceptance of this pluralism, we can detect a certain anxiety with
respect to this diversity, perhaps even a phantasy that the common language of
psychoanalysis is dissolving into different dialects. On a smaller scale the same
thing seems to be occurring in the Jungian world. The threat of Babel seems to
loom over us, and yet, is it really so negative not to speak the same language,
to have learn to translate from one language into another? As Walter
Benjamin (1969) wrote, ‘All translation is only a somewhat provisional way
of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages’, but sometimes it is
exactly this experience of the foreignness of other languages that constrains us
to become aware of the foreignness of our own language. In an essay on the
macaronic use of foreign words written in the thirties, Theodore Adorno
(1992) remarks that the customary ring of naturalness of our own language,
‘creates the illusion that what is said is immediately equivalent to what is
meant’. Does not the fact that we share a common language all too often blind
us to differences that need to be addressed, and is not the need to translate
between one language and another an opportunity to reflect on what we really
mean when we use that familiar term? Each time a new patient enters our
consulting rooms are we not forced to come to terms with the fact that even
when we speak the same language we cannot really understand each other
until we have gone through the slow and painful experience of creating a
common language?
This present paper is an attempt to come to terms with my own personal
experience of moving between cultures and languages, and to reflect on what
the fact of belonging to different linguistic and cultural backgrounds means for
patient and analyst. Before I move on to discuss some clinical aspects I would
like first to examine some of the theoretical implications of the relationship
between psychoanalysis and language. As ever, we must begin with Freud
himself.

In the beginning was the word

For Freud words always lay at the heart of the analytical process. As early as
1890, in an article defending psychotherapy, Freud defines his object:
Psychical treatment denotes treatment taking its start in the mind, treatment (whether
of mental or physical disorders) by measures which operate in the first instance and
immediately upon the human mind. Foremost among such measures is the use of
words; and words are the essential tool of mental treatment. A layman will no doubt
find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be
eliminated by ‘mere’ words. He will feel he is being asked to believe in magic. And
he will not be so very wrong, for the words which we use in our everyday speech are
nothing other than watered-down magic.
To speak in tongues 361

For Freud, the hypnotist’s power comes from the capacity of his words to
communicate affects and to produce a state of identification between himself
and his patient such that the patient accepts that the ideas contained in the
commands come from himself and not from the hypnotist. When Freud began
to distance himself from hypnotism, he had in some way to substitute the
affective power of words with some other power, some other words. His
endeavour was to show that behind the garbled language of dreams and
symptoms lay the truth of the patient, and to uncover this truth all he had to
do was learn to translate, to decipher the text that lay before him. In order
to do this he began to reflect on the relationship between the psyche and
language. Julia Kristeva (2000), in The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt, has
pointed out that during his life Freud constructed at least three different
models of language. In the first model which dates back to his articles ‘On
aphasia’ of 1891 and ‘Project for a scientific psychology’ of 1900, Freud noted
that there is an imbalance, a gap between the verbal and the sexual. To speak,
the subject requires two separate levels of representation, the word-presentation
(centred on sound-image and including a reading-image, a writing-image and
a motor-image) and the thing-presentation (centred on the visual image
and including tactile images and acoustic images). Language constitutes a sub-
system situated at the crossroads between the physical and the psychical and
becomes the means through which thought processes are placed on a level with
perceptual processes, thus giving the thought processes reality and making it
possible to remember them. The function of the psychic apparatus is to ensure
the translation between neuronic excitation, thing-presentation and word-
presentation, with failures in this translatability provoking neurotic symptoms.
In the second model, which dates from The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud
(1900) sees language as an intermediate between the unconscious and the con-
scious, which allows the preconscious to dominate the unconscious. Through
words, which were once perceptions and have therefore left mnemonic traces,
the drives, or rather their unconscious representations, can be brought into con-
sciousness through the work of translation. Kristeva characterizes this model
as optimistic inasmuch as, if the unconscious is articulated like a language,
then it is possible to decipher it and arrive at its rules and thus through this
translation the analyst can access truth. After the First World War, however,
Freud’s vision of the psyche began to take on ever more pessimistic and
unsettling overtones and he gradually moved away from the idea of therapy
as translation to the idea that the psychoanalyst’s task is to create meaning.
The introduction of the second topography and of the concept of repetition
compulsion, the recognition of the interminable nature of certain analyses,
the introduction of the polarity Eros-Thanatos, all this modifies profoundly
Freud’s vision of language. According to Kristeva, Freud’s third and last model
sees language no longer as ‘a solid terrain that leads to truth’ but rather as
a possible source of errors and hallucinations. It is Freud’s recognition that
resistance and hallucinations constitute the two limits to the power of language
362 Angela Connolly

that led him to open psychoanalysis to a vaster process of symbolization that

he refers to as the higher side of man and Kristeva terms significance,
i.e., the process, dynamics and movement of meaning, not reduced to language
alone, but encompassing it. This ‘higher side of man’ is made accessible to
the psychoanalytical experience through the modalities of identification,
idealization and sublimation. The activity of the analyst is no longer to decipher
the truth that lies behind the associative train but rather to bring to light the
possible new meanings that reside within the chain of associations. Lacan,
as Jacqueline Rose (1986) points out in Sexuality in the Field of Vision, read
in this the chain of language itself.

Lacan or the play of the word

When we think of psychoanalysis and language of course we think not so
much of Freud but of Lacan and his famous aphorism, ‘the unconscious is
structured like a language’. For Lacan (1977, p. 20) we are born into a world
of language, into the discourse of the Other, and the unconscious is nothing
but this discourse of the Other, the views and desires of other people that flow
into us through their discourses. The unconscious is thus language and like
language the unconscious is empty. The unconscious is not some vast reservoir
filled with drives, their representations and affects, but it resides simply in
the play of signifiers in endless associative chains for Lacan was a Sassurean
structuralist who went beyond Sassure himself. While Sassure insisted on the
arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified, Lacan completely
severed the relationship, thereby freeing the signifier which is ‘sustained
only by the principle of its opposition to the other’. Meanings are created only
through difference, through the opposition of one signifier to the other. For
Lacan, analytical speech is indexical-pragmatic, i.e., its meaning is entirely
dependent on its intra- and extra-linguistic context, but it is also performative,
i.e., it is orientated from the beginning to the creation of that context that
is the analytical relationship. Its truth lies not in any reference to objective
reality, whether intra- or extra-psychic, but in its self-referential, performative
aspect: ‘Speech as such appears all the more true if its truth is based less on
what we would call its correspondence to the thing’.
If Lacan has the merit of forcing analysis to reflect on its medium which is
speech, Lacanian analytical speech is a very particular kind of speech, which
functions not by pointing to the mythical correspondence between word
presentation and thing representation, but by its capacity to evoke what is
absent, the unity with the original object that we lose when we are born into
language and the symbolic order. Kristeva acknowledges that this model of
Lacan is based on the second Freudian model of language inasmuch as the
Freud of The Interpretation of Dreams saw the task of psychotherapy was
to bring the unconscious under the domination of the preconscious and of
language, but she suggests that Lacan does away with the complexity of the
To speak in tongues 363

Freudian model with its dualism that preserves the existence of the primary
processes and the drives. Daniel Bougnoux (1997) also criticizes the Lacanian
unconscious inasmuch as it has abandoned ‘the immense field of the preverbal,
of images, of the visual, tactile, olfactory representations, of the drive and
everything that lent dynamism to the Freudian unconscious’. Lacan’s linguistic
approach to the psyche and the unconscious has another, important merit
however, in that it forces us to think of the unconscious not only as something
inside, situated along a vertical axis that goes from consciousness to the depths
of the body and biology, but as something outside, situated along the
horizontal axis that goes from the individual, to his relational network and to
the cultural and historical axis into which he is born.

Kristeva and the semiotic

In La Révolution du langage poétique, Julia Kristeva (1984) challenges the
power of the symbolic and of the Lacanian theory of language, arguing that
there exist signifying agencies prior to language; her most original contribu-
tions lie in her attempts to restore analytical access to these prelinguistic
or ‘semiotic’ levels of experience. In the pre-Oedipal phase the infant has as
yet no access to language but its body is traversed by a ‘flow’ of drives which
create a rhythmic pattern that can be seen as a kind of language that has
as yet no meaning. The entry into language represses this ‘semiotic’ process,
but it remains as the ‘other’ of language, a kind of pulsional pressure within
language that manifests itself in its bodily and material qualities, but also in its
disruptions and its contradictions, its silences and its moments of mean-
inglessness. As Kristeva (1994) notes in ‘Psychoanalysts in times of distress’,
‘the development of semiology has led to the conception of different signifying
systems (iconic code, musical code, etc) that are irreducible to language’.
Thus when an analyst listens to a patient, what he or she hears is a polyphony,
a discourse that takes place at different linguistic and pre-linguistic levels
which the analyst must perceive, allowing to each level its correct meaning and
value. Kristeva argues the need for a real ‘poesis’ of interpretation that
includes not only descriptions of mental functioning, but musicality, rhythms
and inflections of the voice as well as tropes and rhetorical devices. This poesis
represents an ‘ultimate reality of transference and counter-transference’ that
can cross conscious listening and address itself directly to the unconscious
representations of the patient. It is here perhaps that we can best begin to deal
with Jung’s approach to language.

Jung and the word as symbol

Unlike Freud, Jung showed no direct interest in language or speech or in
translation as such but only in the production of meaning through the image
and the symbol. For Jung, the psyche expresses itself in images and symbols.
364 Angela Connolly

The image is defined in Psychological Types as,

a condensed expression of the psychic situation as a whole … an expression of the
unconscious as well as the conscious situation of the moment. The interpretation
of its meaning, therefore, can start neither from the conscious alone nor from the
unconscious alone but only from their reciprocal relationship. [The symbol, on the
other hand,] is the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which
for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented.
(Jung 1971, para. 743)

The symbol is distinguished from the sign in as much as the symbol has no
semantic or referential dimension. A symbol is ‘alive only so long as it is preg-
nant with meaning’. The symbol is always
a product of an extremely complex nature, since data from every psychic function
has gone into its making. It is therefore neither rational nor irrational … the pro-
fundity and pregnant significance of the symbol appeals just as strongly to thinking
as to feeling, while its peculiar plastic imagery, when shaped into sensuous form
stimulates sensation as much as intuition.
(ibid., paras. 815–16 & 823)

For Jung, the status of the symbol is determined not only by the attitude of the
observing consciousness but also by the symbolic effect it exerts on the
observer, a somewhat more problematic point of view, opening as it does to
the idea of universals. As Mario Trevi (1986) has pointed out in Metafore del
Simbolo, the Jungian symbol is uniquely intransitive (to use Todorov’s term),
i.e., it does not signify but ‘is’, or rather, it acts, although it does retain, at least
in part, a semiotic character even if what it signifies is indistinct or unde-
cipherable. The Jungian symbol is also synthetic and it is here that Jung owes
his greatest debt to Romanticism. For Frederich Schlegel, poetic thought
(which is essentially symbolic thought) brings together and composes the two
different modes of thought that, kept apart, become ‘deadly’ for the spirit:
systemicity and asystemicity, the system and the breakdown of the system. For
Schlegel poetic thought composes conscious and unconscious, freedom and
necessity, the particular and the general, truth and action, and still further,
intention and instinct, nature and art, form and content, matter and spirit, real
and ideal and so on. But as Trevi states, this is no Hegelian synthesis, no ideal-
ist reconciliation but a paradoxical co-presence, a composition of opposites
that in turn implicates a meta-opposition between tension and conciliation.
The Jungian symbol shares on an operative level this synthetic character of
poetic thought. In the words of Trevi:
In the Jungian symbol, there is no trace of Aufhebung, the going beyond that con-
serves, that constitutes the heart of dialectic thought. There is rather conservation
without going beyond, in the sense that there is the possibility of a creative tension
which can take the place of lacerating desperation.
(Trevi 1986)
To speak in tongues 365

The symbol in Jung is a delicate verbal or visual organ situated in the

mid-point between two activities or functions: the composing activity that
produces the symbol and the composing activity that the symbol produces.
A symbol remains alive until the hermeneutic attempt to grasp it forces us to
arrive at the activity that has produced it and the activity that it produces. If
Jung abolishes the semantic dimension of the symbol, he accurately conserves
its pragmatic dimension as transformative activity. Unlike the pragmatic
dimension of the poetic word, which because of its refusal to refer to other
further meanings acts in the here-and-now to create sense in a profound and
interminable succession of openings and closures, the Jungian symbol tends
towards the dimension of the not-yet. It anticipates that which the culture will
explicate only in the course of time and in times and in ways that are im-
possible to determine a priori. Thus the Jungian symbol has a dimension that
is not only individual and subjective but collective and cultural and I quote
Trevi again:
Far from being only a private ludus of the single individual searching for solutions
for his lacerations, the symbol transforms the individual – preserving his autonomy
and independence – into a subject of culture, into the one who puts forward those
syntheses that maintain the culture in its concrete force of memory of its values while
at the same time critically transforming these same values.

(ibid.)

The function of the analytical relationship in this dimension is essentially

that of a catalyst of the symbol, of an inductor of symbolic activity both in the
analysand and in the analyst. As we can see from these reflections of Trevi,
while Jung took no interest in the semantic-referential and the indexical-
pragmatic dimensions of language, he was profoundly involved in the poetic
symbolic dimension of language, the only dimension capable, in his opinion,
of creating new meanings which can transform both the individual and the
culture.

Abraham or the word as poetry

I would like now to move on to the work of Nicolas Abraham. Abraham
(1995) sees in the investigation of poetic language a royal road to the study of
man as a perpetual and poetic creation of himself. In Rhythms: On the Work,
Translation and Psychoanalysis, he attempts to bring together two separate
areas of research, a phenomenological poetics and a theory of translation.
He begins by defining various types of language, scientific, pragmatic, quasi-
pragmatic and poetic and suggests that these different types of language corres-
pond to the stances or attitudes adopted by consciousness. As a translator
of poetry, Abraham asks himself what conditions must a translation fulfil to
make the poem ‘show’ itself and his answer is that the translation must act to
signal the poetic experience of the poet. For Abraham the poem is essentially
366 Angela Connolly

noetic and here he refers to the distinction Husserl makes between noesis, the
intentional experience which roughly coincides with the psychical, and noema,
the intentional object; between the proper components of the intentional
experience and their intentional correlates. In scientific, pragmatic and quasi-
pragmatic languages the phoneme is irrelevant as such, what matters is the
semanteme, the linguistic element that is the carrier of sense and the sign-
signification relationship can be grasped, it leads to an object, i.e., its signifi-
cation can be understood in and through the sign and one sign can replace
another. In poetry, on the other hand, the rhythm and the phoneme are essen-
tial. The meaning or value of the rhythm is the affective tonality it calls forth
and this is determined neither by its form, or its material, the phoneme, but by
their synthesis. The poetic phoneme is never pure sonority, but it is also a sign,
inasmuch as certain phonemes have expressivity that would seem to coincide
with the homogeneity of the affective ‘halo’ that surrounds them. The various
levels of the poem, rhythmic, phonetic and semiotic, reciprocally determine
each other to produce a sign-signification relationship that cannot be grasped
fully but only understood in part. That is to say, in poetic language there are
only pure significations that do not give any object but that have value in and
of themselves: ‘The objects and emotions it describes are neither in the real nor
even in the unreal. They are only beings of expression’. Significations in poetry
are therefore not a matter of object-consciousness but only of a tendency
towards the object, which is not yet there and which might fail altogether
to materialize. For Abraham, translation is a fiction whereby the work of art
points to itself, without ever fully revealing or exhausting itself and as Rand
and Torok point out, in the last chapter of his book Abraham’s model of
translation does away with the traditional inequality between the original
and the translation, seeing them rather as a dual and dialogical unit. Translation
therefore is an analogical and a symbolic operation where, ‘the symbol is a
tool of interpretation that makes all phenomena into tell-tale texts by reading
in them the tacitly inscribed trace of their own apparently missing beyond’.
Here Abraham traces out a fundamental difference between the ‘lifeless symbol’,
the symbol as a hieroglyph and the symbol included in a process, the symbol
in operation. As we can see, both Abraham’s and Jung’s vision of the symbol
are very close. For Abraham, psychoanalytical listening is a very particular
mode of translation. When the psychoanalyst listens, what he or she hears are
not meanings but symbols and the task is to find the symbol’s undetermined
part, ‘the fragment that symbolizes with … or … co-symbolizes’. Again this is
reminiscent of Jung’s method of working with symbols.

Jungians and the word

All too often however, it is exactly we Jungians who avoid the implications of
Jung’s intuitions on the uniquely individual character of the symbol which
constitutes itself only through the attitude of the individual’s consciousness,
To speak in tongues 367

preferring instead to concentrate our attention on universals, an attitude

which betrays the nature of the symbol. As Kluger (1997) says,
What the image signifies cannot precisely be determined, either by appeal to a differ-
ence or universal … psychic images provide a bridge to the sublime, pointing to
something unknown, beyond subjectivity.

Perhaps part of this difficulty can be attributed to the pre-eminence that we

tend to attribute to the visual image. Mary Lynn Kittelson (1995) has pointed
out that, although Jung clearly states that images can be not only visual but
also acoustic and feeling, most Jungian analysts tend to concentrate only on
the visual. Thus, while analysis is fundamentally a listening art, the result is that
‘our words are heard primarily as content. We pay scant heed (consciously at
any rate) to how they sound’. As Christian Metz notes in his article of 1975,
‘Aural objects’,
There is a kind of primitive substantialism which is profoundly rooted in our culture
… which distinguishes fairly rigidly the primary qualities that determine the list of
objects (substances) and the secondary qualities which correspond to attributes
applicable to these objects.
Primary qualities are in general tactile and visual whereas secondary qualities
tend to be sounds, olfactory qualities and even certain sub dimensions of the
visual mode such as colour. Aural events are much more diffuse, vague and
uncertain than visual events, thus rendering it more difficult to anchor them in
space. Whereas the image is a unity that cannot be broken down into smaller
elements, thus creating an illusion of integrity and authenticity, sound lacks
unity and objectivity not only because it can be broken down into smaller
elements but also because it is an attribute and thus incomplete in itself. Mary
Ann Doane (1982), in ‘Film and the Masquerade’, takes this argument a step
further by arguing that iconic codes such as the hieroglyph tend to be experi-
enced as less arbitrary inasmuch as there is a lack of distance between the sign
and its referent which creates a feeling of immediacy of significance lacking in
the acoustic image. This leads us to see images as symbolic and words as mere
signs, forgetting that words too, through their sonorous quality, can create
symbolic meaning although this meaning is often inaccessible and difficult to
grasp. Pat Berry (1982), in Echo’s Subtle Body, notes that Echo takes shape in
emptiness and lack and that by echoing words, she changes their literal mean-
ing. Echo mimics words but in so doing she destructures narcissistic identity
and creates a space for imagining. Berry reminds us that psychological listen-
ing is about echoing, providing an echo that completes the word to itself, that
coaxes it into revealing its hidden meaning but, as she says, ‘all too often,
interpretation echoes not at all’. The immediacy of the visual image seduces
us into attributing symbolic meaning to it tout court, forgetting that it is only
the attitude of consciousness that creates the symbol … If psychoanalysis is a
listening art then it is first and foremost a mimetic art. Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen
(1993) has suggested that psychoanalysis is just one more chapter in the
368 Angela Connolly

history of ‘treatments of the soul’ that draw their efficacy from the trance and
its mimetic capacity to dramatize, ritualize and resolve disturbances of identity,
whether under the form of possession or dispossession. The trance is both
theatre and language and its acts and speech are always mimetic, i.e., the
subject acts and speaks in and from the place of the other. All too often we
think of mimesis as imitation, a duplicitous copying of a superior original,
but Adorno (1997) in Aesthetic Theory argues that mimesis assimilates the
subject to the object in a compassionate and non-coercive relationship of
affinity between non-identical particulars. Mimesis, as Diderot pointed out in
his discussion of actors, depends on a lack of a fixed self-possessed identity
and it has a paradoxical quality to it inasmuch as the more it resembles, the
more it differs. In analysis, the analyst presents his or herself as empty, without
identity, and thus facilitates the patient’s transferences of the ‘others’ of his
subjectivity, all that he once was and all that he might be one day. By doing
so he places us in the position of his other and full analytical speech comes
about only when we speak to him from this place which is not our own, when
we replicate the speech of the other in a process of echoing, and through this
echoing we bring subject and object into a new, equal and dialogic relation-
ship which creates a tension of opposites and the possibility of bringing into
play symbolic activity. The play of transference–countertransference con-
strains us to speak in a foreign language, a language that we must translate
both to ourselves and to our patients. It is here that I want to bring into play
the role of bilinguism in analysis.

Bilinguism and translation

One of the advantages of speaking more than one language is that it forces one
to become acutely aware of language as a poetic, sonorous experience rather
than just as an experience of meaning. To speak and to understand a language
it is not sufficient to know the words and the grammar. One must also become
aware of the sounds and rhythms of that language and be capable of repro-
ducing them. I can still remember my bitter chagrin when at the age of 18 and
with a very good scholastic knowledge of French, I realized during a trip to
France that I could neither speak nor understand this language adequately,
that although I knew the words, I was surrounded by a matrix of sounds that
were foreign to me. The experience of not understanding and not being able
to communicate produces feeling of alienations from the cultural context and,
at the same time, a feeling of destructuration of identity, of not being the same
person as before, feelings that reproduce in part the psychotic experiences of
de-realization and de-personalization. I personally have gone through such
experiences twice, first when I moved to Italy at the age of 25 and then again
when I moved to Russia 5 years ago. Speaking a new language implies inte-
grating a new way of looking at the world and at oneself and once the process
of destructuration has been worked through, the result is an enlargement and
To speak in tongues 369

an enrichment of the psyche. The very images of things change in different

languages. We all remember the famous observation of Levi-Strauss that when
we say ‘cheese’ and when we say ‘fromage’ we are thinking of different things,
two different experiences of what is semantically the same object. Erwing
Stengel in his 1939 paper, ‘On learning a new language’, suggests that as our
thought processes and words are accompanied by visual images, then it is
logical to assume that learning a new language will modify this relationship
between the word and the image, between the thing presentation and the word
presentation. Citing from his personal experience Stengel notes the different
environmental and architectural images evoked by the German word ‘Univer-
sitat’ and the English word ‘University’. As the authors (Amati-Mehler et al.
1990) of La Babele dell’Inconscio: Lingua madre e lingue straniere nella
dimensione psicoanalitica note, the unconscious representations relative to
‘cheese’ and ‘fromage’ are potentially different, even if we still have to ask
ourselves if these two areas of thought coexist, are in contrast to one another
or mutually influence one another in the course of time. My personal feeling,
however, is that what changes when you move from one language to another
is not so much the image as the affective ‘aura’ of the image. Think for
example of the different listening and speaking experience involved in the
English word ‘pig’ and the French word ‘cochon’. I recollect here a patient who
dreamed that she called her mother a pig but said then, ‘It’s funny but the word
I used was neither Russian nor English but French’ and of course a ‘cochon’
mother is affectively very different from a ‘pig’ mother … think only of the
softness and warmth of the phonemes in French and the hardness and narrow-
ness of the English phonemes. If we concentrate on the visual image then
we think in terms of universals, but if we reflect on the acoustic image we are
forced to think in terms of difference and can begin to draw near to the particu-
lar way in which a subject experiences the object. Yet another example is the
difference between the English word ‘distance’ and the Russian word ‘dalekò’.
While ‘distance’ with its hard dental consonants and its harsh vowel sounds
evokes feelings of separation and coldness, ‘dalekò’ has much softer and fluid
sound to it, evoking the idea of separation as creative absence rather than as
loss. These considerations also make us reflect on what it is in an image that
provokes consciousness into recognizing the image as symbol rather that as
metaphor or as sign. If we think of Jung’s reflection on the fact that data from
every psychic function goes into the making of a symbol, then perhaps it is
exactly this capacity to bring together feelings and sensations, thoughts and
intuitions, the visual image with the acoustic image, that provokes consciousness
into experiencing a symbol, rather than an emblem, sign or metaphor.

Bilinguism and analysis

At the beginning of La Babele dell’Inconscio the authors ask themselves if
being bilingual is a curse or a blessing, and perhaps here it is appropriate to
370 Angela Connolly

define bilinguism. Bilinguism consists in the capacity of an individual to

express himself in another language and to adhere faithfully to the concepts
and structures of that language rather than paraphrasing his native language.
Research into bilinguism is still at a fairly initial state, beset with uncertainties.
It is still not known whether the state of bilinguism is merely the sum of two
monolingual states or if, alongside the two monolingual states, there is a spe-
cific characteristic of the bilingual subject. Again little is known about the way
in which the different languages are organized, how different circumstances
and psychological states may influence this organization, the mechanisms of
codification and decodification, the way in which memories are organized,
whether the mnemonic elements are independent or interdependent and the
way in which the multilingual subject uses non-verbal codes. Uncertain also is
the relationship between language and thought and the debate between the
supporters of Piaget, who hold that linguistic processes and other mental pro-
cesses are independent, and those who support the Sapir-Whorf thesis which
states that the structure of the language determines both what the individual
perceives and the organization of his thought, is still going on. What we do
know however is that from a cognitive, developmental point of view, the
bilingual child often displays an increase in creativity together with an increase
in flexibility and in the capacity to carry out verbal transformations and
symbolic substitutions and this has lead the distinguished Canadian linguist,
Wallace E. Lambert (1977) to distinguish between additive and subtractive
bilinguism. While there is a considerable body of literature on what happens
in the analytical process when the patient is bilingual, there is very little at all
on the influence that the analyst’s state of bilinguism plays in the relationship.
Amati-Mehler who has spoken four languages since her infancy, and who
conducts her analyses in a language she learnt as an adult, does feel that her
linguistic experience has facilitated her in the comprehension of ‘nonsense’
discourses such as those of a child or of a psychotic, while it has proven to be
an obstacle in her work with obsessive patients. She suggests that this facility
is linked not so much to her polylinguism as to a rapidity and fluidity of
associations and a capacity to move between different discourses that allow
her to create multiple construction of alternative meanings. In my own per-
sonal experience of conducting analyses both in Italian and English and with
analysands who speak different languages, English, Italian and Russian, I feel
that it is irrelevant in which language the analysis is conducted but that it is
not at all irrelevant if the analysand is like myself a polyglot. In this last case
there is a facility and a fluidity of association, a capacity on my part to follow
their discourse but also a facility on their part to follow my discourse. Because
of course my language is neither English nor Italian but both and it is a
restriction, an impoverishment, when one can only speak one language, when
the associative chain has to be cut off. The book however has also the merit
of bringing us into contact with the suffering that so many bilingual subjects
report. They observe that in many cases the fact of being bilingual is associated
To speak in tongues 371

with a subjective experience of trauma, of painful experiences of loss of identity

and of difficulties in communication accompanied by underlying mechanisms
of splitting. The authors feel however that it is still debatable whether the
splitting is caused by the bilinguism or whether the processes of splitting
merely make use of the different linguistic registers as a means to organize and
express themselves. They also remark that in this context there is a net differ-
ence between the polylingual subject, who from birth moves between two or
more languages and the polyglot, who acquires one or more different language
at a successive stage of his development, even though, in their opinion, the
subsequent fate of the multilingual subject depends more on the relational
context in which the different languages come onto the psychic scene rather
than on any external temporal scheme. Relevant too is the relationship between
the maternal tongue and other languages. There are enormous differences
between a situation in which the two or more languages co-exist in a creative
dialogue as was the case of the author and is my own personal experience, and
a situation in which the maternal language is constricted into a private inner
space or worse still is suppressed and lost. I would like here to quote from Julia
Kristeva’s ‘Strangers to Ourselves’ (1991) and in particular from the chapter
entitled ‘The silence of polyglots’: ‘Not speaking one’s mother tongue. Living
with resonances and reasonings that are cut off from the body’s nocturnal
memory, from the bittersweet slumber of childhood … thus, between two
language, your realm is silence’. This quotation takes me on to the clinical case
I wish to present, a case in which ‘a language trauma’, the loss of the maternal
tongue, becomes the central image of the analytical dialogue.

The clinical case or the word as trauma

Françoise, when I first meet her, presents a striking contrast between the non-
verbal display of her body and her sexuality, and her painfully inadequate
capacity to express herself in Italian, the language in which the analysis is
to take place. She tells me that she has recently moved to Italy to be with her
present lover but that this move has once again thrown her into a state of
uncertainty and doubt about herself and the direction her life is taking. She
wishes to marry and have children but she has ‘bad luck with men’ … some-
thing always happens to thwart her desire to marry; her present relationship
is going nowhere but she is afraid that if she leaves she will feel even worse.
Her desire to pursue her chosen career as an opera singer, is also constantly
beset by difficulties and obstacles, not least her fear of public performances.
She had come to Italy with the programme of studying with a famous teacher
but she is dissatisfied with the way he works; it was not what she expected
but again she is afraid to look for a new teacher. When I suggest to her that
her poor Italian may hamper communications between us, she tells me that she
was very intrigued by the idea that I am English but that I am capable of
conducting analyses in Italian … she feels that perhaps this will help me to
372 Angela Connolly

understand her better … she insists that her difficulties are only temporary and
that her Italian will rapidly improve. It is perhaps relevant here to discuss the
reasons that lead me to accept Françoise in analysis. On a conscious level it is
part of my style that I tend to trust the patient’s unconscious motivations in
seeking out a particular setting rather than another. In one case for example I
was struck by the remark of a patient who told me in the first session that she
had chosen me because my consulting rooms were near her home, a remark
that obviously evoked all kinds of fantasies of devaluation and denigration of
the analyst. It was only in the third year of analysis when she fell into a deep
regression in which she was unable to drive and could barely drag herself
the few yards that separated her from her analyst that the deeper significance
of her choice of analyst became clear. In this case my fantasy was that this
woman needed a setting in which non-communicability was a feature and
in which the analyst was capable of understanding what it means to find
oneself without words. On a countertransferential level, I was struck by the
fact that, although we had carefully discussed in the first session the rules of
the setting and the appropriate way of addressing each other, in saying good-
bye to her at the door, I called her Françoise and not Miss X … I was surprised
by this act on my part and puzzled by its implications. I was familiar with
Zetzel’s article on the analysability of hysterics and I knew that hysterics
develop a highly sexualized transference neurosis and that this sexualization
tends to block any possibility of analytical work. Was my act an indication of
an unconscious awareness of the impossibility of working with Françoise or
was it a response to some deeper communication on her part? I decided to wait
and see. During the first sessions Françoise reconstructed with some difficulty
her history. She came from a wealthy Iranian family and her parents had both
studied in France and in fact preferred to speak French rather than Iranian
between themselves. When she was 18 months she moved to France and she
was brought up speaking only French. Until the Iranian revolution of 1979,
when her family lost all their wealth, she would sometimes spend her holidays
in Iran with her maternal grandfather, but she never spoke Iranian with him.
She recalls however that unlike her parents, her grandfather was deeply religi-
ous and would involve her in Islamic religious rituals and prayers. She feels
ambivalent about this: on the one hand she blames him for her feelings that
she has no roots, no cultural identity and no homeland; on the other she feels
that he at least gave her a religious identity of sorts because, although she takes
part in no official religious practices, she believes in God and thinks of herself
as Moslem. She tells me that she was a precocious developer and a ‘good’
child, but that she always had difficulties in social relationships because of her
tendency to experience intense distress at even very minor rejections on the
part of teachers or peers, difficulties that were accentuated in group situations.
Even today she has enormous difficulties in groups because of her tendency to
provoke the group into rejecting her although she has much facility in making and
keeping friendships. She narrates with pride that she has friendly relationships
To speak in tongues 373

with most of her ex-lovers. On a sexual level, from adolescence on she has
indulged in promiscuous and unsatisfactory relationships with both sexes.
Emblematic of the pattern of her sexual relationships is the story of her second
love affair. At the age of 18 she moved away from her home to begin her
studies at a conservatoire and went to live with a family of friends to help as
a baby-sitter. She was soon seduced by the father and for two years she con-
tinued to live in the family and look after the children to whom she was very
attached, while at the same time indulging in furtive sexual relationships with
the father, the whole being accompanied by feelings of guilt and unworthiness
that drove her in the end to abandon the family and her lover. The picture she
presents of her family is idealized and sketchy.
I want to turn now to how the dynamics of the transference–counter
transference relationship and how they unfold in the early part of the analysis.
On the one hand Françoise continues to have considerable difficulties both in
expressing herself and in understanding what I say to her. She makes frequent
use of a dictionary to find the words she is looking for and sometimes asks to
be able to draw in order to convey the sense of her dreams. She constantly asks
me to repeat what I say and expresses fears that I will soon grow tired of her,
lose my patience and get rid of her. In this way she is once again expressing
her self-image of the bad and worthless child whom no one can possibly love.
Any attempt to get her to see that this irritation that she attributes to me and
is in fact her own anger at my failure to comprehend her, falls on deaf ears,
just as any attempt to link her incapacity to understand my communications
to her fear that interpretations are phallic attacks, fails miserably. The analysis
is going nowhere. Before the analysis had begun, Françoise had been to a
marriage agency which had put her in contact with an Iranian widower in
Australia and her reaction to the analytical stalemate was to begin to seriously
consider marrying this man and moving to Australia. As so often in the past,
she reacts to the object’s failure by looking for a new object. At this point I
once more act in the setting, this time by twice forgetting that she has changed
the times of her sessions. On the first occasion, I am actually just leaving
the house when I run into her. Her reaction to this betrayal is characterized
by what I can only call extreme pleasure and relief in finding out that she has
compelled me to act for and upon her and at the same time surprise that my
acts have meaning for me if not for her. She can now actualize in the here-and-
now of the analytical relationship the more authentic image of the good and
understanding child who forgives and loves her bad and absent parents. For
the first time she can begin to get in touch with the traumas of her early life
and her anger towards her environment for these failures. This process begins
in a dream that she brings shortly after.
I arrive at the house of my Australian friend, Jim. I went by bus. His house is in the
suburb of a big city. I find there many people … relatives of his. They are well dis-
posed towards me but distant. There is his son, his mother-in law and her husband,
although in reality he died a year ago, just before Jim’s wife was killed in a car crash.
374 Angela Connolly

There is also the grandmother. I feel embarrassed and I see through a window that
my friend is getting out of a car. He’s in smart office clothes and seems merry, in a
good mood. He’s assisted by 3 or 4 other men, his colleagues. They all look rich and
successful. I’m glad to see him. When he comes in he passes near me and pats me
on the shoulder and says something like … ‘Hi there, old friend’. I’m surprised. This
is the first time I’ve seen him in a dream. He goes into his study for important
business deals. I go to the kitchen but nobody needs my help. I go through different
rooms and see myself in the grandmother’s room. I start to talk to her in Iranian.
She’s very old and lives in the furthest away room. I feel very intense feelings.

Françoise is very struck by this dream. In her words:

I think this is a most important image. It’s about roots, origins. My Australian friend
and I have the same roots. Now I feel that nobody needs me: I have no place in
France and I can’t find my place in Italy either. In the dream I run into a dead end.
I try in the dream to confirm my phallic existence by being a wife and a mother but
the dream tells me this isn’t my place. But the dream tells me I had a mummy too.

In this dream we can begin to see how the dissociation between the bisexual
elements prevents Françoise from identifying either with mother or with father
to form a stable gender identity. She belongs neither with the men nor with the
women: She has no place. She is at a dead end, but it is just at this point that
she discovers the lost ‘mummy’ and the lost language of her infancy. After this
dream Françoise begins to be able to establish an affective contact with the
traumas of her early life. When she was born her father was in France for his
studies and the mother lived with her parents. When Françoise was 5 months
the mother joined the father and Françoise stayed behind with her grand-
parents until the age of 13 months when her grandmother fell ill and Françoise
rejoined her parents. For the first year of life she lived in an Iranian linguistic
environment and her first words were in Iranian. She only began to speak
French from the age of 13 months although her mother had always told her
that she spoke only French and in fact she remembers no Iranian. Her grand-
mother died when she was 18 months, but Françoise was only told this when
her grandfather arrived in France and she asked where was her grandmother
and her mother said to her: ‘She’s dead. She’ll never come to you again’.
Françoise’s mother told her that after that she expressed neither surprise nor
sorrow but only asked where she was buried. We begin for the first time to ex-
plore her feelings about her family. The image of her grandmother as a positive
and caring figure is contrasted with the picture that begins to emerge of her
mother as a fickle and sometimes cruel figure who was unable to enter into
emotional contact with her little girl because of her own emotional problems
and her chronic ill health. The father appears to have been experienced as a
benevolent but unavailable figure, who abandoned her to the mercies of her
mother. Françoise reacted to her mother’s refusal by adopting an attitude of
extreme compliance with her mother’s needs and wishes, and it was only after
the birth of her brother when she was 14 that she began to change into a ‘bad’
girl. After her mother’s refusal to pay for Italian lessons, she began to lose
To speak in tongues 375

interest in her studies and gradually sexual acting-out began to dominate

the clinical picture. As Masud Khan (1983) noted in his article ‘Grudge and
the hysteric’,
Adult sexuality in the hysteric is not so much the vehicle of instinctual gratification
and nourishment as an idiom to communicate deprivation and a technique for ex-
pressing hope that the object will heal the dissociation through reading the ego-needs
that are unconsciously expressed through overt sexual compliance and instinctual
seeking.

Through my unconscious countertransferential acts, I was able to establish a

point of contact with Françoise. By ‘acting’ in the setting it was as though
I had signalled a willingness on my part to speak ‘her language’ which is the
language of the act. By my capacity to explore my countertransference I could
show her the possibility of ‘translating’ acts into meanings.
I would now like to jump on three years in the analysis. Much has changed.
The unconscious identification with her grandmother and myself has helped
her to develop her femininity in a way that is new for her. Françoise has met
and married a very caring and warm man and she has had her first child. Her
husband is extremely supportive both of her analysis and of her career, which
is beginning to take off. Much work has been done on her image of femininity
as deficiency and lack and we have been able to explore together her castrating
fantasies and her attacks on her husband’s genital function, on her son and on
her own phallic functions. She continues however to present difficulty in her
capacity to speak and understand Italian. I would like now to discuss a dream
from the end of our third year.
I am in a foreign country and I meet a family friend of my husband’s, who has been
very kind to us in the past. We go to a restaurant and we sit at a table. We sit opposite
each other and she looks at me and I can see her sad eyes. She says to me, ‘Please …
you can tell me about your problem’ and suddenly I feel a very strong physical
sensation … like a rape. It is as though something long and hard and strong has been
shoved into my vagina.

Françoise says about the dream that she thinks it’s about entering into contact
with a protective figure without mediators. She remembers that this woman is
the same age as her grandmother when she died. She says that before she feels
the pain, she thinks to herself that she cannot use this time to talk about herself
because she should be talking about her family; then, her friend looks so tired
and they are talking in Italian which her friend talks with some difficulty. Any-
way though she is pleased the friend invites her to talk. This dream expresses
all Françoise’s fears of what Masud Khan (1983) calls ‘psychic surrender to
the object’ and her difficulties in establishing mutual psychic dialogue with
herself and with others. The figure of her friend represents both her grand-
mother and her analyst. In this analysis, the patient sits opposite me. This
time, not only does she speak to the analyst-grandmother, but also this figure
speaks to her, she initiates the classical analytical discourse, ‘Tell me about
376 Angela Connolly

your problems’. She feels the affective warmth of the words spoken but she
cannot let herself go to this figure and to her invitation because of her fears of
damaging and destroying the analyst mummy. At this point the warm feelings
are transformed into the physical sensations of being raped, of an inner space
that is violated. The split between the grandmother and the mother is repre-
sented in all its dramatic implications. She knows and feels that what the
words communicate are care and love, but she also knows that using mummy
destroys the good mother, leaving her alone with the bad seductive mother
whose words violate and invade her private space. We can begin to understand
through this image the meaning of her choosing an analyst whom she cannot
understand and with whom she cannot communicate fully. If we had spoken
the same language, then she would once again have been faced with the situ-
ation in which the words of the other are acts which violate and seduce her
and where the other misinterprets her body language, not as needs but as
sexual communications. Because I accept her silence and the difficulty of
communication, because I renounce any attempt to interpret to her, she can
regress back to a pre-verbal state where words count not as meanings but as
sounds and rhythms, a sonorous matrix through which she can begin to re-
establish a contact with the lost maternal body and with her own body needs.

Theoretical considerations
This clinical vignette forces us to reflect on the problem of establishing an
analytical dialogue with an hysteric. In the hysteric everything is dissociated.
The hysteric speaks and feels only through the body while words have lost
their capacity to convey meanings and feelings. Normally when we hear a
word, we hear it both affectively through the sounds and rhythms of the word
and mentally by recognizing the content of the word, and these two different
levels reverberate together to increase the significance. Meltzer (1984) in Dream
Life says something similar when he suggests that in the dream, vocalization
‘is a linguistic symbolic form which stands in a fugue relation to the visual
image of the dream as plastic symbolic form’. For Meltzer, song and dance,
vocalization and gesture, serve to communicate states of mind through the
operation of projective identification, whereas verbalization serves to com-
municate information about the outside world. In the hysteric these two levels
are dissociated and antagonistic towards each other. We could say that hysteria
is a disturbance of translation and to comprehend the nature of this disturb-
ance I would like to briefly bring into play the work of three different analysts,
Ferenczi, Laplanche and Bollas. Ferenczi in the famous article of 1933,
‘Confusion of tongue between adults and the child’, introduces a distinction
between the language of the adult, the language of passion, and the language
of the child, the language of tenderness, and he underlines the traumatic nature
(for the child) of the meeting between these two tongues. Laplanche (1989)
goes further still in his book New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, where he
To speak in tongues 377

describes the encounter between the infant, whose psychosomatic structures

are situated predominately at the level of need, and the signifiers coming from
the adult that pertain in part to the satisfaction of the needs, but which also
convey enigmatic messages of a sexual nature. These enigmatic signifiers leave
behind traces, which the child must learn to master and symbolize, and the
partial nature of this translation means that unconscious residues are left
in the child. Bollas (2000) in his new book, Hysteria, introduces a time factor
into Laplanche’s scheme when he suggests that sexuality is traumatic for all
children as it transforms the caregiving mother ‘mamma’ into ‘mother’, the
father’s and the child’s sexual object. Bollas feels that this transformation is
endlessly traumatic for the hysteric and that the hysteric personality forms
itself on the basis of an organized opposition to this knowledge. It would
seem to me that, while in health, the mother as sexual object does not replace
the mother as caregiver but the two exist together in dialogic relationship, in
hysteria the sexual mother replaces and suppresses the caregiving mother.
Thus the hysteric is blocked into an endless confusion of tongues. Acts are
words and words are acts. The sexual idiom expresses tenderness and need and
the idiom of tenderness and care expresses sexuality and desire. It is an
analytical axiom that the hysteric’s acts and symptoms communicate, but is this
really true? The hysteric uses her body as a theatre or perhaps we should rather
say, as a screen on which she projects her inner drama and she uses the analyst
as a passive spectator but, just as in the cinema, we can neither touch nor
communicate with the actress. As Bollas (1987) writes in The Shadow of the
Object:
If we realize that the hysteric’s externalization of psychic states occurs because of her
adaptation to the mother’s failure to internalize her child, then I think it becomes
clearer to us why hysterical patients bring with them an urgent need to become an
event in our presence so that it is exceedingly difficult to forget them. We are wit-
nessing the infant’s desperate effort to implant an image of herself inside the refusing
mother … such an aim takes priority over thinking, reflecting and understanding.

In such cases the only response that the patient can become aware of is the
analyst’s countertransference. In Bollas’s case the countertransference was
manifested in the numbing of his self states and the blocking of his thought
processes and feelings of blankness. It was only when he used his counter-
transference directly and communicated his feelings to her that he was able to
reach the patient. In the case of Françoise, the analytical dialogue was facilitated
both by my initial acts which began the process and by my acceptance of her
archaic and pre-verbal level of communication and my capacity to accept my
impotence. With the hysteric we have to go back to the very beginnings of
language to discover together a new language in which the splits between acts
and words, vocalization and verbalization, affective meanings and semantic
meanings, sexuality and tenderness can be finally healed. Without my personal
experience of what it means to find oneself without words, what it means to
have to begin from the beginning to learn not only a new vocabulary, but a
378 Angela Connolly

new way of looking at the world and speaking it. I am convinced that I would
have been unable to help Françoise in her task of finding the words with which
to speak herself.

TRANSLATIONS OF ABSTRACT

Výtah: Po pøehledu rùzných psychoanalytických pøístupù k jazyku autorù jako je

Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Jung a Nicolas Abraham, zkoumá autorka problém
‘analytického naslouchání’. Jde o postoj, který musí každý analytik zaujmout ke
slovùm analyzanda, která musí být vnímána nejen ve smyslu jejich obsahu, ale
pøedevším podtextu. Žijeme v kultuøe, v ní ž pøevažují vizuální obrazy nad
akustickými a až pøíliš èasto je tento kulturní trend opakován v analýze. Musíme
slyšet ‘poezii’ analyzandova sdìlení, abychom poskytovali ‘ozvìnu’. Tou je analytická
odpovìï, která spoluvytváøí symboliku a pomocí níž pak analyzand dochází k
pojmenování èi metafoøe otevírající symbol skrytý za slovy. Autorka se dále dostává k
problému bilingvismu a jeho roli v analýze. Podle ní mají bilingvní analytici usnadnìný
úkol naslouchání a výkladu. Bilingvismus zvyšuje rychlost a fluidnost analytikových
asociací a zároveò zostøuje povìdomí toho, jak podtext slova mùže subtilnì mìnit
jeho význam. Pøednáška konèí klinickým portrétem ilustrujícím roli jazyka u hysterie.
Hysterická disociace mezi tìlem a duší je doprovázena disociací mezi verbalizací
a vokalizací uvnitø jazyka samého. Takové disociace se mohou pøipojit k
traumatizujícímu vlivu støetnutí ‘jazyka nìhy’ a ‘jazyka vášnì’; potøeb dìtského
pøipoutání (attachment) a rodièovské sexuality. V takových pøípadech mùže být
selhání v komunikaci rozpoznáno zejména prostøednictvím analytického protipøenosu.

Après avoir passé en revue les différentes approches psychanalytiques du langage chez
Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, Jung et Nicolas Abraham, l’auteur s’intéresse à la question
de ‘l’écoute analytique’, de l’attitude que tout analyste doit avoir vis à vis des paroles
de l’analysant; elles ne doivent pas être entendues seulement au niveau de leur contenu
mais surtout de leur sonorité. Nous vivons dans une culture où les représentations
visuelles l’emportent sur les représentations acoustiques et cette tendance culturelle se
retrouve trop souvent dans l’analyse; ce n’est que lorsqu’on peut entendre la ‘poésie’ du
discours de l’analysant qu’on est à même de renvoyer un ‘écho’, une réponse analytique
capable d’entrer en résonance symbolique, d’offrir à l’analysant une parole ou une
métaphore qui libèrera le symbole qui se trouve caché derrière ses paroles. L’auteur
s’intéresse ensuite à la question du bilinguisme et à son rôle dans l’analyse. De son point
de vue, les analystes bilingues sont aidés dans leur tâche de compréhension et de traduc-
tion du fait que le bilinguisme favorise la rapidité et la fluidité des associations chez
l’analyste en même temps qu’il aiguise son acuité à repérer comment la sonorité d’un
mot peut subtilement modifier sa signification. L’article s’achève sur une vignette clin-
ique qui illustre le rôle que le langage peut jouer dans l’hystérie. La dissociation entre
le corps et la psyché se double d’une dissociation à l’intérieur du langage lui-même,
entre la verbalisation et la vocalisation. Ces dissociations peuvent être liées à l’impact
traumatique de la rencontre entre le ‘langage de la tendresse’ et le ‘langage de la
passion’, entre les besoins d’attachement de l’enfant et la sexualité parentale. Dans ces
To speak in tongues 379

cas-là, c’est essentiellement l’usage que l’analyste fait de son contre-transfert qui permet
de réduire la dissociation.

Nach einem Überblick über die verschiedenen psychoanalytischen Zugänge zu Sprache

von Autoren wie Freud, Lacan, Jung und Nicolas Abraham untersucht der Autor das
Problem des ‘analytischen Zuhörens’, der Haltung, die jeder Analytiker gegenüber den
Worten des Analysanden einnehmen muß, gegenüber Worten, die nicht nur in ihrem
Inhalt sondern auch in ihrem Klang gehört werden müssen. Wir leben in einer Kultur,
in der visuelle Bilder über akustische Bilder die Vorherrschaft haben, und nur zu oft
wird dieser kulturelle Trend in der Analyse wiederholt. Aber nur dann, wenn wir die
‘Poesie’ im Diskurs des Analysanden hören können, sind wir in der Lage ein ‘Echo’ zur
Verfügung zu stellen, eine analytische Antwort, die co-symbolisieren kann, die dem
Analysanden ein Wort oder eine Metapher anbieten kann, die das Symbol entschlüsselt,
welches hinter seinen oder ihren Worten verborgen ist. Die Autorin wendet sich dann
dem Problem der Zweisprachigkeit und seiner Rolle in der Analyse zu. In ihrer Sicht
haben es zweisprachige Analytiker leichter in ihrer Aufgabe von Zuhören und
Übersetzung, da Zweisprachigkeit die Schnelligkeit und Flüssigkeit der Assoziationen
des Analytikers erleichtert und gleichzeitig seine oder ihre Bewußtheit dafür schärft,
wie der Klang eines Wortes in subtiler Weise dessen Bedeutung verändern kann. Die
Arbeit schließt mit einer klinischen Vignette, welche die Rolle illustriert, welche Sprache
in der Hyterie spielen kann. In der Hysterie ist die Dissoziation zwischen Körper
und Psyche begleitet von einer Dissoziation innerhalb der Sprache selbst, zwischen
Verwörterung und Verstimmlichung. Diese Dissoziationen können in Verbindung
gebracht werden zum traumatischen Einfluß des Aufeinandertreffens der ‘Sprache der
Zärtlichkeit’ und der ‘Sprache der Leidenschaft’, von den Bindungsbedürfnissen des
Kindes und elterlicher Sexualität. In solchen Fällen kann das Scheitern der Kommuni-
kation prinzipiell gelöst werden durch den Gebrauch, den der Analytiker von der
Gegenübertragung macht.

Dopo un esame dei diversi approcci al linguaggio di autori quali Freud, Lacan,
Kristeva, Jung e Nicholas Abraham, l’autrice esamina il problema dell’ ‘ascolto
analitico’, dell’atteggiamento che ogni analista deve assumere nei confronti delle parole
dell’analizzando, parole che devono essere ascoltate non solo in rapporto al loro
contenuto, ma soprattutto in rapporto al loro suono. Noi viviamo in una cultura dove
le immagini visive predominano sulle immagini acustiche e troppo spesso tale tendenza
si ripete in analisi, ma è solo quando noi possiamo udire la ‘poesia’ del discorso
dell’analizzando che siamo in grado di fornire una ‘eco’, una risposta analitica che
possa intrecciarsi simbolicamente, che possa offrire all’analizzando una parola o una
metafora che svelerà il simbolo nascosto dietro le sue parole. L’autrice si occupa poi del
problema del bilinguismo e del suo ruolo in analisi. Dal suo punto di vista gli analisti
bilingue sono facilitati nel compito di ascolto e di traduzione, perché il bilinguismo
facilita la rapidità e la fluidità delle associazioni dell’analista e nello stesso tempo
acuisce la consapevolezza di come il suono di una parola possa cambiare sottilmente il
suo significato. Il lavoro termina con un breve esempio clinico che mostra il ruolo che
il linguaggio può giocare nell’isteria. Nell’isteria la dissociazione tra il corpo e la psiche
è accompagnato da una dissociazione nel linguaggio tra la verbalizzazione e la
380 Angela Connolly

vocalizzazione. Tale dissociazione può essere connessa all’impatto traumatico tra ‘il
linguaggio della tenerezza’ e ‘il linguaggio della passione’, tra i bisogni di attaccamento
del bambino e la sessualità parentale. In tali casi il fallimento della comunicazione può
essere risolto principalmente dall’uso che l’analista fa’ del suo controtransfert.

Después de revisar diferentes teorías psicoanalíticas sobre el lenguaje de autores tales

como Freud. Lacán, Kristeva, Jung y Nicolás Abraham, la autora analiza el problema
de la ‘escucha analítica’, de la actitud que cada analista debe asumir en relación a
las palabras del analizando, palabras que deben se tomadas en cuenta no solo en su
contenido sino sobre todo en relación a su sonido. Vivimos en un mundo donde las
imágenes visuales predominan sobre las imágenes acústicas y con demasiada frecuencia
este factor cultural se repite en el análisis pero es solamente cuando podemos escuchar
la poesía del discurso del analizando que podemos proveer un ‘eco’, una respuesta
analítica que pueda co-simbolizar con, que pueda ofrecer al analizando una palabra o
metáfora que pueda desbloquear el símbolo escondida detrás de sus palabras. La autora
entonces se ocupa del problema del bilingüalismo y su papel en el análisis. Desde su
punto de vista, los analistas bilingües son facilitados en sus metas para oír y traducir,
debidi a que el biligüalismo la rapidez y fluidez de las asociaciones del analista, y al
mismo tiempo agudiza su conciencia sobre como el sonido de una palabra puede sutil-
mente cambiar su significado. El trabajo culmina con la presentación de un caso clínico
el pape que el lenguaje puede jugar en la histeria. En la histeria la disociación entre
mente y cuerpo es acompañada de la disociación del lenguaje dentro de sí mismo, enter
verbalización y vocalización. Estas disociaciones pueden relacionadas al impacto
traumático del encuentro entre el ‘lenguaje de la ternura’ y ‘el lenguaje de la pasión’,
entre las necesidades relacionales del niño y la sexualidad parental. En tales casos la
To speak in tongues 381

falla en la comunicación puede ser resuelta primordialmente con el uso que se haga de
la contratransferencia del analista.

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