Self and Other in the Child's Experience of Language: Hofmannsthal's 'Letter of Lord Chandos'

The paper discusses the fantasies that might be involved in children's language learning through a psychoanalytic interpretation of the Austrian poet, Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Chandos crisis, focusing especially on the famous 'Letter of Lord Chandos'. A precocious young poet for a time loses his faith in language, and lyrical fluency gives way to silencing scepticism; an experience of almost magical control of language collapses into one of total estrangement. The contrast, it is argued, is between language experienced as part of the self and language experienced as other. Possible origins of such adult fantasies about language in the child's experience of language are discussed. Drawing on Lacan's characterization of the Imaginary and the Symbolic and his suggestion that the child's entry into language has the structure of the Oedipus complex, language's role in the separation-individation process is discussed. Language, mediating the child's entry into intersubjectivity, forces the child to renounce fantasies of omnipotence and possession of the mother. Where the child is reluctant to renounce such fantasies, language's demands may be resisted.

The experience of magical fluency may also have its origins in the child's experience—when the voice of the mother is an integral part of her reassuring presence. Language as voice may thus be introjected to become an internal object in the child's world. This will be based on an essentially pre-linguistic experience of language, thus later experiences of language may seem to be a falling away from this paradigm of presence.