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When Freud wrote On Aphasia in 1891 (Freud, 1891), his subject was linguistics: patients who lost their capacity to use language, to use words. He focused on the neurological aspects in strong disagreement with the localizing mainstream; for Freud, using language involved a “networked” brain. His theory no doubt was influenced by his experience with Anna O, the patient who described her therapy with Breuer as “the talking cure.” We find his concept of the “thing-representation” and the “word-representation” also in his Project (Freud, 1950a (1895)). Freud’s great interest in language also shows in his Psychopathology of everyday life (Freud, 1901) where he gives numerous examples of linguistic parapraxis.
So, from the start, there was a strong relationship between linguistics and psychoanalysis. Within psychoanalysis, this relation can be seen in the work by Lacan and Lorenzer. But linguistics went a separate way. In Linguistics and Psychoanalysis, after a broad tour of linguistic theory, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio proposes his own idea of how language is developed (phylogenetic) and how we acquire it (ontogenetic). In my review, I follow Bonfiglio on his tour and include a lot of the names of the researchers he referenced.
Linguistics – the study of language – was, in Freud’s days, philology. Bonfiglio quotes Von Humboldt who described the study of language as “the study of the world history of the thoughts and sensations of humankind in all aspects and all stages of its culture” (p. 9). In the second half of the twentieth century, it became linguistics, an autonomous discipline.
Bonfiglio starts his tour with the work of Bréal, one of the founders of semiotics and teacher of de Saussure. Bréal emphasizes the fact that the language we use does not conform to formal logic; instead, overdetermination is most important. A word can be used literally or metaphorically, can be concrete or abstract. Words can carry contradictory meanings,