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… words are the essential tool of mental treatment. A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by “mere” words. He will feel that he is being asked to believe in magic. But we shall have to follow a roundabout path in order to explain how science sets about restoring to words a part at least of their former magical power.
One of the tasks of psychoanalytic treatment is to restore to words their power of enchantment. That is the subject of this paper. In Kristin's story we shall see that words and language have been not only dulled but frozen. At home they formed the prison house of the well-regimented daughter. When spoken by others or by “adults” in the transference, her personal task was always to try to interpret the hidden meanings she felt the words disguised. Not only was language a dangerous enterprise in which more often than not she felt trapped, but there was no possibility of word play nor any pleasure left in the process of communicating through words. This is the story of how the empty language of an alienated self tries to regain its lost, magical power of signification, thus reconstructing a shattered unconscious body image. Because words were ineffective in communicating as we shall see further on in this paper, it was mainly through her drawings and sculptures that her story and unconscious body image were reconstructed.
Kristin, now thirty-four years old, came to see me when she was twenty-four. She was the first child of a very young