Speech as the Confluence of Words, Body, and Relationship: Discussion of Harris, Kirshner, and Spivak

I initiated this project with the hope that juxtaposing distinct understandings of the role of speech and words in psychoanalytic treatments would bring to light some of our latent assumptions and assist us in more clearly articulating our beliefs about the therapeutic potentials of language, perhaps even rewarding us with a clearer sense of the nature of language as viewed through the lens of its clinical potential. Those hopes have been realized through the marvelous words of Alan Spivak, Lewis Kirshner, Adrienne Harris, and Ilene Dyller. What immediately strikes me about these papers, so different in content and tone, is the very rich understanding of language at the heart of each. Although the authors contend differently with the heterogeneous nature of speech and language, and with the relationship between language and thought, the unconscious, and the body, none of them dismisses the power of words on the basis of their being abstract symbols. Quite the contrary. Moreover, framing the question of therapeutic action around talking has yielded theorizing that places the relatedness that occurs in speech at the center of this question of therapeutic action, where it belongs. Each author envisions an essential interweaving of language and relationship in speech.

For Spivak, words effect change because they are the medium through which the analyst can do two things simultaneously. First, the analyst uses words to transform the unconscious wishes that fuel the transference into a form that is accessible to the patient's conscious mind; thus, “Psychoanalytic knowing is re-knowing,” or knowing in a new form. Second, speech is a medium through which the analyst relates to the patient in such a way that inspires an experience of being understood and recognized. The analyst's interpretation in particular is at once an