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This article by Jeanine Vivona is the latest in a series of her papers (Vivona 2003, 2006, 2009) addressing language in psychoanalysis. A book on the subject is also in preparation (Vivona forthcoming). In this body of work, which ranges expertly and thoughtfully across both empirical research findings and clinical psychoanalysis, Vivona has taken the perspective that language is given too little attention and granted too little significance in contemporary psychoanalysis. Her readers get the impression that she has strong feelings on the subject, although we must read between the lines to reach that conclusion, because Vivona always thinks and writes carefully and precisely, and avoids stridency, preferring to allow the accumulation of evidence to speak for her.
Another hallmark of Vivona's work is the inexorability of her arguments. She marshals evidence so masterfully that one is hard pressed to imagine coming to a conclusion different from hers. Beginning to read this essay is like stepping into the top of a chute at a water park: there is only one route to the end, and the trip takes place without your having to make a lot of decisions along the way. Vivona begins by demonstrating that infants are capable of perceiving and making use of the sounds of adult speech, goes on to challenge the deeply entrenched notion that language, because it can symbolize only selectively, violates the “full texture of lived experience,” and then pulls the argument together by demonstrating that infants understand and use some of the meanings of aural speech. She concludes that there are grounds to challenge the long-standing belief, inside psychoanalysis and outside it, that there exists an exclusively nonverbal and sensorimotor period of infancy (see also Litowitz 2011). The conceptual importance of that challenge is that, if there is no such period,