A Discussion of Jacques André's “Le malentendu”

I have been asked to write a discussion of Jacques André's “Le malentendu,” in the hope of developing further exchanges between francophone and anglophone psychoanalytic cultures. For anglophones who had the opportunity to hear Jacques André at the annual meeting of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society in June 2004 and read the translation of his text, this paper will be an extension of the discussion that took place there. For those readers who are new to his work, this discussion will give a flavour of Jacques André's mode of thinking that can, I believe, open new ways of encountering language as a phenomenon in the psychoanalytic situation. This discussion is not intended as a critique of the paper but as an attempt to take its illuminating central idea—that analysands speak in different dialects, that is to say, they use language in their own style—and explore clinical and theoretical implications of this encounter with the analysand's style of speaking.

In his paper, Jacques André renders his impressions of two patients who are swimming in language but have not yet learned to speak, that is, they have not come into language as a vehicle to express their own subjectivity. Being a subject has a double sense here—a subject who speaks and a being who is subject to language. However, the notion of the “subject” and subjectivity is further complicated because language itself is the centre of debates in the twentieth century that range across philosophy, linguistics, and psychoanalysis. In this paper, I will be discussing some philosophical and linguistic approaches to the region that Jacques André is exploring—that region between phone (voice) and lexis