Psychoanalysis, speech, language

Abstract

Psychoanalytical situation is mainly speech relation, a speech event. Speech communication cannot be reduced to semantic domain. To speak is not solely to say. Speech can have concrete effects. In psychoanalytical situation, as in any speech relation, listener is exposed to both prosodic effects and effects of words. At primitive mental organizations, inability of semiotization of inner states leads to specific intrusion of prosodic elements in subject's speech. These acoustic elements, which can be in function of evocation of rudimentary metalized, unnamed, non-semiotized inner states, can, potentionaly, have effect on recipient. In interpretation, whether working with patients with primitive mental organizations or with neurotics, it is necessary to have in view these performative effects of speech. Discourse characteristic for transfer situation can be shaped in such a way to produce desire and hide persistent lack in being. The discourse?s meaning than does not lie primarily in speech as in excess of saying, in pereformative effects of words. It should be kept in mind that the meaning of patients speech never unfolds fully for the analyst, that it slips through, fiddles away... When patient's speech resists interpretation, analyst?s desire for knowledge can interfere in analytical process thus leading to its impasse. Successful outcome of analysis should lead to de-idealization of analyst as subject who is supposed to know.