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Dr Burnham has done his task well and kindly (Burnham, 1974), well for the audience and kindly toward the author. And like a good discussant, he has helped me to see what is unclear in the paper (Meltzer, 1974a) and in need of expansion.
First of all, of course there is no such thing as a full-scale theory of language and what is attempted in my paper is the beginnings of my personal psychoanalytical theory of language, i.e. one that I can use in my consulting room.
Second, I have not made it clear that I am talking about functions and not uses, i.e. the mental functions which play a part in the composition of language as a complex mental function itself. Dr Burnham is talking about the uses of language and that is a different matter and I would find little to object to in what he says. (If this distinction is not immediately clear, more extensive discussion of it can be found in Wittgenstein, 1960); (Bion, 1963).
I personally do not agree with the extrapolation of Winnicott's concept of transitional object to include speech as this seems to me to explode the term and render it useless.
It is not surprising to me that Dr Burnham has some difficulty with the idea that autistic phenomena are meaningless, as this runs counter to the whole tradition of psychoanalytical thought. However, it is a conclusion that we reached slowly and painfully against the same resistance and we put it forward in all seriousness. We very strongly suspect that the autistic manoeuvre of dismantling the senses is an attack on mentality proper and we have pleaded this point at far greater length in Explorations in Autism(Meltzer et al., 1974) than was feasible in my paper which is in fact a chapter of that book.