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'Talking', says Fenichel, 'is the very instrument of psychoanalysis' (4). But it is a mistake to consider only what the patient says and not how he says it; the form of linguistic expression is just as worthy of psychoanalytic research as its content.
According to Richard Sterba (11), 'Language expresses mental contents in a threefold way. First, it is used to express conscious contents which the ego wants to communicate, that is, it expresses what a person wants to say. Second, it expresses unconscious contents through the conscious expression as mediator. It is this layer of contents in the verbal expressions of the patient which we try to interpret when we observe the sequence of thoughts, the concatenation of associations in the patient's productions, the peculiarities of verbal choice, and the slips of the tongue. Third, we find that the peculiarities of pronunciation of language and the mannerisms of speech serve in their own way as manifestations of unconscious contents apart from the contents of the verbal expressions in their obvious and in their hidden meaning.'
Psychoanalytic studies of the forms of linguistic expression have been mainly concerned with the (predominantly motoric) disorders of articulation. A number of workers have studied the problem of stuttering; Fenichel (4) reviews this literature up to 1945. Stengel (10) and Edith Buxbaum (1) investigated the psychopathology of the 'foreign accent' in persons who had acquired a second language. An especially interesting contribution to the psychoanalysis of speech motility came from the 'character analysis' of Wilhelm Reich (9), particularly in his well-known paper on the technique of interpretation and the analysis of resistances.