Confusion of tongues: A defense mechanism and a complex communication of unwelcome children with an early broken intimacy

Abstract

Starting from the concept of confusion of tongues between passion and tenderness, the authors illustrate two clinical situations of traumatized children and adults and try to show how these kinds of patient are not able to give voice to and symbolically represent their archaic anxieties connected with their having been Ferenczian “unwelcome children.” Therefore, in the therapeutic situation, they often make use of the language of “passion” and sexualization in order to communicate to the analyst their early broken intimacy and their traumatized “tenderness,” related to a lack of parental libidinal involvement and of maternal permeability to their raw emotions, which gave rise to their “passion of death.” Sketching out two clinical cases (an adolescent and an adult), the authors describe how, in their opinion, this confusion of tongues may be the only way for some patients to represent and share the traumatic events of their past, while at the same time it may become a deep-rooted, strong, rigid, and exciting defense mechanism against an early child depression connected with devitalizing unconscious identifications.