I have always been interested in language, and how the ability to speak many of them, to think and dream in them, impacts who and how we are. When, and how we learn a second or third or fourth language influences not only how we communicate with others, it also shapes the particular content and […]
It has occurred to me that all of us speak in many tongues. There is our everyday language, how we speak to others in the course of our day. There is our professional language, for me, the language of psychoanalysis that I share with colleagues and patients. There is the language of emotions, dense with […]
Really? Yes. Or as physical as one can get in a blog, and as a psychoanalyst. Lets talk about bodies. Our bodies. How they speak and what they say. This is an area that has been largely ignored, or relegated to second place in psychoanalysis. Mostly, because as psychotherapists we have grown more comfortable with […]
Much of the psychotherapeutic hour is based on dialogue. On putting our experience into words, as an attempt to communicate to another what has happened, what we feel, what we remember. The interchange that ensues in each clinical hour is particular to the experience of each patient and their analysts’ experience of them. Each […]
Several weeks ago I wrote a blog about language and its limitations. I was essentially addressing the area of our experience that is not language bound, or if it is, it is bound to a language of affective experience and emotion, which cannot be captured in words, and often, disrupts logic and our sense of […]
As a psychoanalyst I believe in the power of words – spoken, written and thought. So at first, it may seem paradoxical that I should think of language as limited in helping us access and interpret our experience. It is, after all, our way of being conscious- we think in words, we articulate our thoughts […]