Panel on 'Language and Psychoanalysis'

Victor H. Rosen opened the panel with the observation that numerous parallels exist between linguistics and psychoanalysis. For example, both depend upon the reconstruction of the past as an important tool, and both are concerned with the relationship between language and thought (Rosen, 1966), (1967), (1969). Freud's structural theory, Rosen noted, had its precursors in the 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' (Freud, 1895) and in the monograph On Aphasia(Freud, 1891). In both of these monographs Freud had stressed the unique potential of the auditory modality for the development of language and suggested that consciousness might be intimately connected with words. Through the coding and decoding of thought, language facilitates self-awareness, and, in creating a sensory trace, words provide a means for the registration of abstract concepts. The analytic situation interrupts many of the usual signal sending and receiving systems and places almost total emphasis on vocal-auditory interchange. Free association, though it encourages the production of fantasy, also demands the most articulate account of it that the individual can produce. The alteration of psychic structure through the use of language is one of the goals of the psychoanalytic process.

Rosen enumerated three areas where problems of psychoanalysis and problems of linguistics meet. These are:

• 1rule-directed behaviour in general, including language behaviour.

• 2The relation of language to thought. Do they have a unitary development or do they have separate origins? (Compare Vygotsky's (1934) concepts of preverbal thought and pre-intellectual speech.)

• 3The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, also known as the theory of linguistic relativity. Rosen suggested that psychoanalysis, through the access it provides to the unconscious, might afford a new avenue of approach to test the hypothesis of linguistic relativity.1

After Rosen's introduction, panel members and speakers addressed themselves to the role of language