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Many bilingual individuals describe a different voice for each language, which dictates not only how something is expressed but what is said and who says it. This dynamic was highlighted for me when my then three-year-old daughter heard me conversing with a linguistically-mixed group of neighbours and declared I was nicer in Spanish. On reflection, I realized she was responding not only to its more formal mode of address but also to a different affective stance on my part. Walsh's work addresses the phenomenon of language-based selves within the field of transference. The topic of bilingualism has generated a vast scholarly literature spanning multiple disciplines. Within psychotherapy, discussion has centered on the bilingual patient and the impact of language use within treatment. Her article now adds a needed emphasis on the bilingual therapist and the presence of multiple-linguistic self-states within both analyst and analysand. Focusing on the bilingual therapist who learns a second language after gaining linguistic proficiency, she posits transference to language itself based on the object relational contexts within which it is acquired. The author explores whether a different kind of therapist operates in each language, with unique capacities for self-examination and object relationship.
In the vocabulary of linguistics, bilingual persons inhabit two independent language systems. Each is associated with a language-specific sense of self, rooted in language codes with distinct social-contextual and object relational underpinnings. Much of the psychoanalytic literature on bilingual patients stresses the primacy of the mother tongue in integrating experience. In this view, verbalizing events in the language in which they were experienced makes them real, allowing connection to body-based affective self-states and relational configurations. Conversely, use of a second language can defend against emotional intensity, a concern raised by Freud (1918) in his treatmen