Meetings of the Psychoanalytic Association of New York

April 17, 1967. LANGUAGE, VERBALIZATION, AND SUPEREGO: SOME THOUGHTS ON THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE SENSE OF RULES. Charlotte Balkanyi.

Dr. Balkanyi discussed the interaction of the 'individual's verbal and superego development on the one hand and the influence of the superego on the young child by the instrumentality of language on the other'. She describes language as a mass psychological product. Applying Winnicott's views to early language development, the use of language is a transitional phenomenon. But words differ from other toys in being shared by the whole environment. The child adopts the tools of language quickly, identifying with the mother's ego and introjecting traits of the mother's superego. As he acquires language, he creates by putting his own thoughts into the language form acquired from without, thus integrating himself with a group.

The treatment of a ten-year-old stammerer was described to illustrate the relationship of a dysfunction in verbalization to 'a delay in conforming to the convention of language'. The boy's difficulties were the sequelae of his verbal dysfunction. The unstable binding of energy by means of verbalization was considered to be the cause of his ego and superego weakness; the meaning of words was not safeguarded by a deeply accepted convention, a superego formation.

The author emphasized the importance of 'air-symbolism' in the psychopathology of stammerers. Three factors are always present in these cases: anxiety production, anal significance, and introjective-projective identificatory mechanisms. The abstractive process of verbalization removes us from tangible reality and contributes to the ability to think about ourselves with that distance Waelder considered the superego's fundamental attribute. The word brings a new style, 'the style of reflective man'. The linguistic system enables us to relate to things in a reality-adapted way.