Language and the Development of the Ego

In his introduction Victor H. Rosen pointed out that psychoanalysis has long demonstrated the possibility of modifying psychic structure through the impact of verbal communication. Moreover, it has been shown that normal ego development depends, at least in part, upon an optimal level of verbal stimulation; and, conversely, that ego defects of any origin are reflected in disturbances of verbalization.

The Study Group for Linguistics and Psychoanalysis of the New York Psychoanalytic Institute was inaugurated in 1963 with the goal of acquiring from linguistics and related fields information, viewpoints, and methods that could be useful in psychoanalysis. Some of the researches of the group are reflected in papers prepared for the panel by Henry Edelheit and Samuel Atkin, and the organization of the panel was itself, in part, an outgrowth of the study group.

Following Ferdinand de Saussure, Rosen distinguished between language (la langue) and speech (la parole). Language is "a system of voluntarily produced symbols" (Sapir). It may also be described as a mnemic-representational organization within the ego. The term speech, Rosen recommended, should be reserved for the vocal-auditory aspects of verbal communication, and the term language code can serve to designate the shared verbal conventions of a language community. In addition to the strictly coded aspects of language (phonetic, syntactic, and semantic), auxiliary mechanisms such as volume, pitch, rate of delivery, and bodily movements play a part in communication. Rosen grouped these auxiliary mechanisms under the heading paralanguage. He preferred to attempt no compact definition of the ego, but suggested that the panel consider the minimal requirements for a structure that is able to store, encode, and decode language, in addition to performing the other well-known ego functions. It has been shown that language is not simply a function of brain size, but is dependent on structure, specifically the structur