Some thoughts on the use of language in psychoanalysis

In this paper I comment on several aspects of the way language is used in psychoanalysis. Language is viewed not simply as a “package”; for carrying ideas and feelings, but as a medium in which thoughts and feelings are created. In the analytic setting, analyst and analysand are viewed as engaged in an effort to use language in a way that is adequate to the task of creating/conveying a sense of what it feels like for the patient to be human, to the extent that he is capable at a given moment (with particular emphasis on describing the leading anxiety that the analysand is experiencing). The analyst strives to use language in a way that embodies the tension of forever struggling to generate meaning while at every step casting doubt on the meanings “arrived at”; or “clarified.”; Forms of lifelessness of analytic language are discussed with emphasis on those forms of linguistic deadness that derive from (1) the analyst's ideological attachment to a particular school of analytic thought and (2) the analyst's ...