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The Psychoanalytic quarterly, 1949, Vol. XVIII, No. 3, p. 279.
The histories of two children who clung to a marked accent in speech revealed their hostile identification with their fathers. These fathers had foreign accents. Even though the therapist had an accent herself, the patients' accent disappeared with the resolution of their anxiety. Two adult women are reported who used the avoidance of their childhood language as a mechanism of defence against infantile sexuality. It is demonstrated by the author that learning to speak and enunciate a foreign language is subject to the mechanisms which produce slips of the tongue, stammering and stuttering, and may be employed as a defence mechanism.