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The Babel of the Unconscious: Mother Tongue and Foreign Languages in the Psychoanalytic Dimension, by Jacqueline Amati-Mehler, Simone Argentieri, and Jorge Canestri, is an impressive tour de force on a subject about which little has been written. The authors
give a comprehensive discussion of clinical and theoretical issues regarding multilingual patients and analysts. They also draw on the work of multilingual authors describing their own experience and discuss related topics such as multilingualism in children, and comparing language to nonverbal modes of communication.
The authors start with a discussion of the myth of Babel, a myth that apparently exists in many cultures. A golden prehistoric time is described when all people understood each other. Then a cataclysmic event shattered their harmony, and everyone was dispersed. No longer able to communicate as before, all spoke different tongues. The authors comment on the appeal of such a story as symbolic of our infantile preverbal paradise. They even posit that the appeal of such linguistic theories as Chomsky's Universal Grammar may draw on the yearning for such oneness. By contrast, the authors also present Sapir's theory about the individuality and idiosyncrasies of each language as it constructs a particular vision of reality, unique and not quite replicable in another language.
The volume includes a fascinating chapter on the history of the linguistic and cultural roots of the earliest analysts, starting with Freud. They compare Freud's struggles to practice in English, driven by economic necessity, with Ferenczi's ease and flexibility in using several languages. The authors enlighten us as to how much multilingualism and polyglottism (the first means more than one language from the start; the latter means acquiring languages later in life, after the formation of one's identity) were part of the early analytic scene: The famous Anna O was aphonic, and then could only speak English, which for her was a forei