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In addressing the topic of the influences of psychoanalysis as an intellectual system upon linguistics as the systematic study of language we are viewing a subject with little, if any, past, some present and an open, hopeful future. Those few linguists who have utilized psychoanalytic theory to explain or expand their own hypotheses will be mentioned where relevant in the paper and our ideas regarding the potential usefulness of aspects of psychoanalytic theory to linguistics will be presented at the end of the paper. This paper, however, essentially deals with the reverse, i.e. the influence of linguistic theory on psychoanalytic theory. Beginning with Breuer and Freud psychoanalytic theoreticians have realized the importance of language phenomena for explaining and describing the development and functioning of the mental apparatus, as well as its place in the clinical setting (e.g. 'talking cure', free association, interpretation, etc.). To enhance their theories and practice, psychoanalysts have sought out theories of language (e.g. Freud, 1910, uses the work on primitive language by philologist Karl Abel to underscore the lack of negation and the unity of contraries and contradictions in dreams). What has not been obvious in the incorporation of this linguistic material is the fact that the theories about language which analysts have used are taken out of the continuum which represents the history of linguistics. Therefore this paper will emphasize the place that the various psychoanalytic notions of language occupy in relation to the whole of linguistic theory. In doing so we will in essence also be doing an extensive review, with commentary, on what particular language concepts influenced each particular analyst's notions about language. An unawareness of the history of linguistics as a series of theories about language which supplant one another leaves many psychoanalytic authors wedded to an outdated theory (e.g. Shapiro, 1970), writes about the begi