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Ours is a talking profession. Language—more specifically oral language—is the principal instrument with which we work as therapists, our principal research tool, and the medium we use for communication. On the face of it, linguistics should be numbered among those basic sciences on which psychoanalysis depends. Yet it is the case that during some 80 years of psychoanalytic development the study of
language qua language and the application of insights derived from the study of linguistics have played a minor role. This is the case despite the fact that, as Shapiro points out, "as therapists we depend on metaphorical representation" (p. 107). Indeed, it is a truism that without the figures of speech, whether in the form of dream symbols or as elements in free associations, psychoanalysis would be impossible.
Clinical Psycholinguistics seems to provide some understanding of why this paradox exists. The author cites de Saussure who invoked the distinction between, "… la langue (language) and its particular form, la parole (speaking) to inform us that speech is a particular mixture of physical, physiological, psychological and social factors which may concern us in our investigation of language as an institution and as a formal system. Speaking is studied by different methods than is language. Language may be viewed as a systematic, codified area for study which was by and large ignored until Saussure effected his distinction" (p. 15). Speech, Shapiro notes, is only one of several instrumentalities (the list also includes patterned behavior, gesture, affect, and sign language) that can be used as a medium for communication. Linguists, however, apparently limit their efforts to understand communication to the study of the structure of oral languages and the patterns of their change over time. It is by virtue of this emphasis that their interests and those of psychoanalysts, who are users rather than students of oral language, diverge. The divergence is perhap