The Babel of the Unconscious. Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Psychoanalytic Dimension. : By Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, Simone Argentieri and Jorge Canestri. Madison, Connecticut: International Universities Press. 1993. Pp. 322.

I have always been interested in the subject of language, so I was immediately excited and enthusiastic to have the opportunity of both reading and reviewing this book. It has always surprised me that such an important theme has received so little attention in psychoanalytic circles, particularly in the British Society, where language and its vicissitudes are barely mentioned and whenever anyone dares to do so, finds little or no echo to their interest. This has always puzzled me, for the whole question of differences among languages, nuances, puns, jokes etc. contains a very rich, vast world of information about one's unconscious and also about one's external circumstances. This is not, of course, the case in other societies, where the importance of language has been taken into account more seriously, as in the case of the French analysts, who have been, to a lesser or greater degree, influenced by Jacques Lacan, who saw language as a very crucial issue in anyone's analysis. Perhaps the shadow of the majority of analysts’ inability to read Freud's original writings in German lurks heavily in the background. Bruno Bettelheim referred abundantly to this problem, which has given origin to some misconceptions due to the erroneous translation of certain words.

This is the review of the English translation of the original book reviewed by Adam Limentani in the Summer of 1992. Those who read it might experience a certain déjà vu feeling as inevitably we both say similar things on more than one occasion.

It is only fair to say that this book—new, original