A Second Confusion of Tongues: Ferenczi, Laplanche, and the Trauma of Social Life

Abstract

ABSTRACT In recent years, psychoanalysis has become more aware of, and concerned with, the ways in which social forces affect the development and experience of subjects directly. Yet as a discourse and theory of human development, contemporary psychoanalysis still lacks sufficient accounts for how the social becomes psychological. Freud’s psychoanalysis offers the concept of the superego as a means of explaining how social realities and norms enter and play a part in the psychological life of the subject. But if we were to disengage this useful concept, the superego, from the now problematized notion of the Oedipal as its raison d’être, we are left with an empty construct, and a phenomenon to which new developmental accounts need to be attached. I suggest in this article that psychoanalysis provides us with two major conceptual frameworks up for the task: Ferenczi’s seminal notion of “confusion of tongues,” and Laplanche’s notion of the enigmatic message. Reading Ferenczi closely, I suggest that although he speaks explicitly of one confusion of tongues, his body of work implies two confusions, the second more general and perhaps more profound. I use this reading to expand both Ferenczi and Laplanche beyond their original field of reference, the play of sexuality between adults and children, to the more general question of how our relationships with our parents function as an intimate socialization mechanisms. I argue that as both Ferenczi’s notion of the confusion of tongues and Laplanche’s notion of the enigmatic message are concerned with the enigmatic and potentially traumatic differences and attachments between adults and children, they are well suited to account for how we all become social subjects, that is, the subjects of social power.