Psychoanalysis in Your Native Language

You could say a person enters language even before they’re born. While still in the womb, people are already talking about them, choosing a name for them, telling them who and what awaits them in this world. And at the very moment of birth, a child enters a space made of words. The language of childhood creates the space that supports and sustains us for the rest of our lives.

So why does it matter so much to work in analysis in your native language?

For a psychoanalyst, it matters which culture and which language shaped the person who has come to therapy — because language structures our psyche from birth, forming our world and our sense of it. What matters is which words a person uses to remember their childhood, how they describe a situation they’re in and their relationship to the difficulties they’ve faced. It often happens that an analysand arrives “prepared,” recounting what they believe is the “right” information in a very clear, structured way, using various clichés, diagnoses, and images picked up from the internet to describe their feelings and emotions.

A psychoanalyst constantly asks again what even the most ordinary, simplest-seeming words actually mean, because it matters to understand what’s hiding behind the “facade” of those words — what they mean for this particular person, what subjective sense they carry for them.

Working with emigrants, and with people who speak more than just their native language, it often happens in therapy that an analysand doesn’t even notice slipping a foreign word into their speech. The psychoanalyst always notes such moments and, together with the analysand, tries to work out why they used this particular word in this context rather than its native-language equivalent. The psychoanalyst tries to understand what role the person assigns to each language they speak. In this way, foreign words become a useful source of information in native-language therapy.