Summer school

On the final day of the Summer Psychoanalytic School "The Tragic Dimension of Oedipus", organized by the International Institute of Depth Psychology jointly with the University of Cotes d'Azur (Nice, France), the Ukrainian Association of Psychoanalysis (Kiev, Ukraine) and the International Federation of Psychoanalysis (Strasbourg, France), I had the opportunity to I am honored to present my paper on the topic “Multilingualism and Psychoanalysis”. The theme of war, emigration, exile, exclusion is so closely woven into the history of psychoanalysis that multilingualism and psychoanalysis constitute a symptom in relation to each other. Many psychoanalytic institutes were founded by exiled or emigrated psychoanalysts or by second generations of emigrants (for example, the Psychoanalytic Association in Argentina, Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, France, Great Britain and the United States). The “place of the foreigner” merges with the place of psychoanalysis also in the experience of transference. Nevertheless, there are as many figures of exile as there are figures of compromise in relation to the castration complex. For example, multilingualism, emigration and internationalism allowed Vladimir Granov and Viktor Smirnov to position themselves differently in the history of psychoanalysis: as an exile and as a psychoanalytic traveler. The issue of the subject’s collision with languages is associated with the dimension of the Letter, which opens up the field of language for the subject. Potential bilingualism is determined by the properties of the functioning of the signifier. The subject's bilingual ability is predetermined by the internal bifidity of the signifier, the discrepancy between speech and writing. Questions suggested for colleagues to consider: choice of language in the analytical process; the concept of "maternal" language and infantile language, in which the mother is prohibited; radically unit lalyang; affects, mnestic traces and Writing; alienation of the subject in language; how the idea of different languages arises in a young subject. Jacqueline Amati Mehler, Etienne Oldenhove, Martin Petras, Pierre Fedida, Nazir Hamad, Colet Soler, Mareike Fedida, Gilles Deleuze and many others offer their reflections on the topic of multilingualism and polyglotism and reading clinical cases of bilinguals, subjects with episodes of mutism caused by a change in linguistic and cultural space , share the experience of undergoing their personal analysis in a language other than their mother’s, and the experience of historicizing their subjective response to multiculturalism and multilingualism in the transference. There are many authors who chose to abandon “their maternal home” and write works of fiction in another language. Beckett, who seeks the truth of silence beyond Irish English and speaks “without words” in French, who subsequently resorts to the operation of translating his own works into English (British); Kafka, shared by German and Czech; Borges, fluctuating in a dozen languages; Conrad switching from Polish to English, Amitav Ghosh using five languages alternately. I think it is also important to psychoanalytically comprehend the departure from the territory of language in the so-called “minor literatures” (as a manifestation of exteriorization) and the “future past” in the genre languages of ancient Greek literature. Western European psychiatrists, psycholinguists and psychoanalysts know the case of Louis Wolfson, whose attempt to fit into a language by constructing “his own French” (from the substrate languages of Russian, Yiddish, German, English and French) is read as a way through writing to arrive at a creative invention, so important for the psychotic subject. The “linguistic emigration” itself, “exile in language” can be to some extent accidental, provoked by external circumstances, but from the position of psychoanalysis, they are determined unconsciously and fit into the history of the subject in a certain way. A change of language, which is explained by the subject as socially, politically, genre-conditioned conscious choice of one language and rejection of another, the change of language by adolescents to a language different from the parent, breakthroughs of one language into the fabric of another in the speech of a bilingual - all this becomes analytical material today and sets that impossible task, it seems possible to begin to comprehend it only by remaining at positions of psychoanalytic ethics.

Summer school

Summer school