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Theoretical and technical implications for polyglot analysts of having polyglot patients were recently addressed by Flegenheimer (1989), focusing on the vicissitudes of working in secondary languages. An unmentioned linguistic variable that also needs to be addressed in polyglot dyads are parapraxes produced in the recall and verbalization of musical evocations.
The Emperor Charles V is supposed to have said: “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse.” (Rawson and Miner, 1986, p. 170). If the emperor had either a male or a female therapist, in spite of the language of treatment, predictably, he could have evoked a song in any of these four languages in his long-term memory that may or may not have been understood by his analyst. In the ideal, not so frequent situation, the analyst was linguistically matched and knew the song.
In 1953, Reik proposed that, “What is neglected in the study program of psychoanalysis, is, to use the musical term, ear training: the development of a higher sensitivity to musical phenomena of all kinds—for instance, to minute distinctions in tone” (p. 12). Reik underscored that up to that time Freud's seminal observation in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) that highlighted the importance of paying attention to musical evocations had mainly been ignored:
If anyone takes the trouble, as Jung (1907) and Maeder (1909) have done, to note tunes that he finds himself humming, unintentionally and often without noticing he is doing so, he will pretty regularly discover the connection between the words of the song and a subject that is occupying his mind. [The latter reference was added in 1910.] (p. 215)
Freud did not offer any example of parapraxes in songs in this work. However, he did test the significance of slips in poems when “a younger