Psychoanalysis and Its Own “Confusion of Tongues”: Toward a Language of Inclusion

Abstract

Language is the place we call “home”—that which bonds, binds us to the Other. But what happens if we leave home and wander into other reaches of language? Who and what do we leave behind and with what consequences? While we psychoanalysts are trained to pull for deep modes of expression from our patients, there is still a strong pull from our own academy to stay within bounds of the proven or provable, the intellectual, the abstract, the theoretical—to exclude the affective from our own discourse. This article explores this turn away from affectivity, not only in the clinical setting, but in other venues where analysts/therapists meet, greet, write, speak to each other. Our guides for this exploration are Kohut, Loewald, and Ferenczi, who brought us his concept of the “confusion of tongues.” The article suggests another reading of Ferenczi’s words, pointing to a new language of affectivity and inclusion.

Keywords:

• affectivity
• “confusion of tongues”
• empathy
• inclusion
• language of psychoanalysis
• moments of being
• poetics of language

Notes

¹ I choose to forgive Nelson Mandela for his less-than-inclusive articulation of what is, indeed, a human, not a gendered experience.

² Cited from a poetry reading at the MLA Annual Convention (1998) in Luz María Umpierre (2002), ‘Unscrambling Allende’s “Dos palabras”: The Self, the Immigrant/writer, and Social Justice’, MELUS 27 (4): 29–136, pp. 135–136.

³ The paper was presented in November 1973 at the University of Cincinnati on the occasion of Kohut receiving an honorary degree of Doctor of Science.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hilary Maddux

Hilary Maddux, LCSW, has had a private practice in New York City for more than 25 years, with a special interest in trauma and the interface of psychoanalysis with philosophy, the arts, ethics, and social justice. She holds an analytic certificate from the Institute for the Psychoanalytic Study of Subjectivity (IPSS) in New York City, as well as specialized training at NIP and the William Alanson White Institute.