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From the moment that the only injunction given to the analysand, in the form of the fundamental rule, enjoins him to say everything that comes to his mind and to do nothing, psychoanalysis cannot neglect the study of language and speech, as it is refracted by the analytic situation between two partners. In fact, apart from certain arrangements reduced to their minimum, the lever of analysis rests on two props: silence and interpretation, or alternatively internal speech and enunciated speech. The analyst who undertakes to inform himself about linguistics is entering a maze where he will have to sift out that which seems to him to be fruitful from his point of view, from that which he can afford to ignore as it only concerns him very remotely, without however contesting the value it may have for others.
What conclusions will he draw from it? First, that language is a form. More precisely:‘The activity of language is meaningful in the measure that an enunciator produces forms so that they are recognized by a co-enunciator as being produced in order to be recognized as interpretable’ (A. Culioli). Comprised in this definition are the references:
to a couple enunciator/co-enunciator
united by conventions concerning forms (acceptability)
produced and recognized
interpretable.
When one examines these forms more closely, one notices the mutual influence of a system of monomorphic sounds (that is, exclusively constituted by sonic forms of which all language is constituted) and polymorphic conceptual references (referring to thought elaborated from heterogeneous elements: imagination, reason, movement, etc.). These two intersecting spheres of sound and meaning constitute the indivisible nucleus of language which reaches us via
the language spoken by a community using speech as the singular expression of a speaking subject. Two levels are to be noted: the first is that of the composition of the sounds belonging to language (thought-sound), itself subdivided into grammar, syntax