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"… the souls of men are the gift from language to mankind." Alfred North Whitehead (1938, p.41)
THE GESTALT PSYCHOLOGIST WOLFGANG KOHLER once surmised that if a fish were to become a scientist, this scientist-fish's last discovery would be water, given it's ubiquitous and therefore all too familiar presence. In psychoanalytic theory, the same might be said of language. While Freud's discovery of the repression of words was the virtual starting point of psychoanalytic inquiry, the word is taken (by Freud and his "mainline" followers) as a manifestation of the self's functioning, rather than as an actual feature of that functioning. Among interpersonal analysts, while Sullivan placed great emphasis upon the consensual validation language brings to our development, he and his followers have had little to say about the role language plays as a structural feature of the self. That is, language has been appreciated as a medium of communication; it has been neglected as a structure that, as proposed some time ago by Mead (1934), transforms the individual into a social, self conscious being.
Recently, Levenson (1983) has responded to this neglect by proposing "semiotic competence" as a principal goal of psychoanalytic work—the capacity to effectively relate what is said to what is done. In this essay, I follow Levenson's lead, in terms of an assumption concerning the work, that the individual must develop some awareness of him or her self as a creator of meaning; and of language as our principal medium for the realization of meaning. An understanding of how language functions in relation to the self is therefore seen as critical to our understanding of psychoanalytic practice.