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Those individuals whose major interest is in the study of human relationships must realize the importance of language not only as a specific means of communication but also as an index of more general cultural patterns. Language customs are important indicators of the social attitudes underlying them. These customs change and develop very much as do other products and instruments of culture, although language is, of all these factors, the most static. It is my purpose to trace the evolution of one such language custom and to indicate the effect that unconscious processes have had in these changes. Such a study must interest us not only as students of human nature and the culture which develops on the basis of this, but also as clinicians whose essential task it is to understand the interplay between the individual and the culture of which he is a member.
When I address an intimate or a member of my family I say 'you'. Likewise when I address a stranger I call him 'you'. This was not always the case. In plays of the time of Shakespeare we observe a clear distinction between familiar address, in which a person is called 'thou', and formal address, in which a person is called 'you'. We have now discarded this distinction by dropping altogether, save in certain very exceptional circumstances, the familiar 'thou' and replacing it with the more formal 'you'.
This distinction, now lost in English, still exists however in German and in most of the other modern languages ultimately derived from Sanskrit—the Indo-Germanic group. In German the familiar form is Du, the formal or courtly one, Sie. I would like to remind the reader that this Sie is not the word which in German means she but, since it takes the plural form of the verb, is the word which means they. This is extraordinary. If