The polyphony of contemporary psychoanalysis: the multiple languages of man

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe work begins with general considerations about man’s symbolic universe and his varied languages. It carries on with the consideration that the linguistic essence of man is his nominating speech, different from all other languages in the animal kingdom. Through a clinical illustration the work moves on to discuss the vicissitudes of human language when it cannot name certain experiences. The work proposes that the contemporary analyst can and should listen to the varied languages of man and, with a specific technical stance, help the patient, through intermediary moments, to think what was unthinkable, to name what was unnameable. It departs from listening to the language of the non-symbolic, which depends on the analyst’s capacity for reverie and their capacity to metaphorise the patient’s reports, to propose instead the construction of symbolic forms through the use of scaffolding for thinking. This is what permits the historicising, the placing of the patient’s life in a narrative. If this does not take place, there is an eternal presentification of the traumatic emotional experience, resulting in the “murder of time” (Green).