Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES
- Points of view
- Making love to my ego
- The pinball project
- Psychopolitical cults
- The wet group
- Interpersonal skills
- Learn and enjoy
- Another language
- English identity, Ireland and violence
- Racing
- Diana's subjects
- Personal response under attack
- In Disney's world
- Looking to the future, and back
- Windows on the mind
- Soap trek
- Clubbing
- E and me
- Garage nightmares
- Helpless in Japan
- Greek chairs
- Open secrets
- Passé
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTH TODAY
Another language
from PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- PREFACE
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTHOLOGIES
- Points of view
- Making love to my ego
- The pinball project
- Psychopolitical cults
- The wet group
- Interpersonal skills
- Learn and enjoy
- Another language
- English identity, Ireland and violence
- Racing
- Diana's subjects
- Personal response under attack
- In Disney's world
- Looking to the future, and back
- Windows on the mind
- Soap trek
- Clubbing
- E and me
- Garage nightmares
- Helpless in Japan
- Greek chairs
- Open secrets
- Passé
- PSYCHOANALYTIC MYTH TODAY
Summary
Many people in Britain face the task of speaking something other than English with a great deal of trepidation. Unlike the majority of the world's population, which speaks more than one language as a matter of course, we find the experience bewildering. And that bewilderment is part of the helplessness that characterises a position all too familiar to all of us; as we stumble over unfamiliar words and phrases we are once again infantilised, put in the position of the infans, one ‘without speech’. Stereotypical accounts of Japanese children in the English imagination, that they are silent in class and only speak when they have fully mastered a new language, function as a further reminder that regression to the level of the child who cannot help but display its inability will be the fate meted out to us as we learn another language, here and now.
Psychoanalysis might be useful to make sense of this, and varieties of psychoanalysis that have emphasised the role of language in the development of the unconscious should have something worthwhile to say.
There are five ways it does:
First, another language is another symbolic system. To be in another language is to be in a symbolic space, but space that feels buoyant enough to hold us as we float through it. When we are flattered enough by native speakers that our accent is perfect and that we are perfectly comprehensible to them, there can be moments of ecstatic, omnipotent illusory freedom.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Psychoanalytic Mythologies , pp. 31 - 34Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2009