Gohar Homayounpour (2006): The Transferential Nature of Language in the Analytic Situation: Can One be in Analysis in the Wrong Language?

Abstract:
This qualitative inquiry explores bilingual analysands' fantasies about the importance of specific language in psychoanalysis. The study specifically focuses on the comparative preference of the mother tongue over a second language. The choice of a language, in this study, is treated as a transference communication and as a fantasy object of desire.

The data for this paper come from the in-depth interview of a sample of 16 bilingual analysands. The specific questions that are investigated are: a) what fantasies do bilingual analysands attach to their mother tongue as a medium of analysis; b) how do those analysands who have had analysis both in their mother tongue and in a second language feel about the role of language in their analysis; c) do bilingual analysands wish to have their analysis in their mother tongue or would they prefer to have their analysis with an analyst who comes closest to their transference object regardless of the language used; d) what is the crucial parameter of communication in psychoanalytic discourse; and e) does that parameter function on the level of content (semantics), or does it work on the level of emotional relationship (pragmatics).

The data point to a number of common fantasies that the participants attach to their mother tongue. These fantasies all tend to be emotionally loaded speaking to the affective nature of the mother tongue. In the analysands' reported desire for a particular language in analysis, we hear their transference communications about their analysts, including their fantasies about the pre-oedipal mother, as well as their infantile longings.

The findings tend to shed some light on how language may be used to encode early affective experiences and how it may be employed as a defense against the painful awareness of some of those experiences.