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Every psychoanalyst dreads that moment when some wellmeaning naif corners him at a cocktail party and asks what it is we really do with patients and we are obliged to answer, lamely, “Well, we talk with them.” It seems a sorry virtuosity, this being masters of the commonplace. After all, everyone knows how to talk. Yet, as I shall elaborate, from a structural linguistic perspective on psychoanalytic process, there are extremely subtle and intricate ramifications to this most ordinary and unselfconscious function.
Psychoanalysis has, ever since Anna O. so felicitously named it, been the “talking cure.” Leo Stone called speech “the veritable stuff of psychoanalysis (Stone, 1973), and, more recently, Paul Ricoeur has said that “there enters into the field of investigation only that part of experience which is capable of being said” (Ricoeur, 1977). I quote these two contemporary sources to affirm that this is by no means a vestigial concept. Yet, we know that all the talk in the world doesn't change patients, that persuasive formulations of psychodynamics can fall flat, and that neophyte analysts more often talk too much than too little. It seems more likely that what these authors really imply is that psychoanalysis is the nonacting cure: that is, what is acted-out, not talked about, cannot be encompassed in the treatment. This would certainly be consistent with Freud's position in “Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through”: “He [the therapist] celebrates it as a triumph for the treatment if he can bring it about that something that the patient wishes to discharge in action is disposed of through the work of remembering” (Freud, 1914).