You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
A bilingual female patient started a session in Spanish. She had been in therapy for a year, and previously English had been her language of choice. At first I was startled and did not know what made her switch to her first language. I wondered what had happened during the previous session to make her switch languages. I questioned her about it. The patient's response was that remembering the childhood experience of not being heard by her mother (which she related half in English and half in Spanish), made her aware of all the things that she could tell me more emotionally (“from my guts”), in Spanish. She also became conscious of her cautiousness of using Spanish for fear I would not understand her.** With this statement, the patient was cognizant of the emotional connotations of her first language and after some time, the transferential implications of her statement. Is this kind of interaction, language switching, a common occurrence in a bilingual analysis? If the patient of my example had not switched languages, could that transference response have appeared? If the patient was in treatment with a monolingual analyst what transference response could have developed?
The primary intent of this article is to answer some of these questions. The secondary objective is to illustrate the influence of language choice in treatment and its effects in the transference-countertrans-ference. I address issues associated with the patient's and analyst's usage of their mother tongue or first language learned as well as their second language, showing the different responses from both members of the dyad. Before doing so, I would like to define some terms and review the significant articles on this topic in the literature that address some of these problems.