Psychoanalytic Reflections on Language Distortion and Empathic Listening

The evocative psychoanalytic revisions of Jacques Marie Emile Lacan (-), amid a flurry of controversies regarding its clinical, literary, and even intellectual relevance, have brought increased attention to the signification and listening processes that transpire between psychoanalyst and patient. This has come about largely through renewed focus on the role of language and distortions of language within the psychotherapeutic relational process, in addition to the larger thematic-and content-related foci that have generally occupied psychoanalysts' attention.

I have elsewhere attempted to elucidate the role of language distortion, bearing particularly upon Lacan's notion of the castration or the “symbolic wounding” of the Word (1956a/1977, p. 65; 1956b, p. 269), in the case of a Hebrew-speaking obsessional schizoid patient who, in a kind of private language, masculinized the feminine-gender second-person pronouns and certain nouns (Spero, 1990). Here I would like to deepen the analysis and elucidate some Lacanian and post-Lacanian contributions to the listening process and its linguistic underpinnings, illustrated by a microevent drawn from the reaction of a therapist (and the supervisor) to a linguistic-relational impression created by a Hebrew-speaking psychotic patient. As such, I have directed my observations not primarily at the level of the patient's psychopathology-for, as will be evident, the patient herself does not directly introduce an error in language-but rather at the level of the listening process of the therapist. The inferences to be presented admittedly draw upon clinical intuition a bit more heavily than I would prefer, although I offer whatever confirmatory trends have been permitted by the circumstances of the treatment. On the whole, the material will enable a reconsideration of the empathic listening process in the light of the stimulating theses of Jacques Lacan.

By way of preface, one notes that the subtle nuances