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In this collection of papers, published in two parts (the first in this issue, the second in the next), Psychoanalytic Dialogues considers the power, scope, and place of language process and linguistic analysis in psychoanalytic theory and practice. You might say the journal is finding, or refinding, meanings of a central element in its name—Dialogues.
Language has, of course, never been far from the epicenter of psychoanalysis: “the talking cure,” an analysand's first term for psychoanalytic process; the mutative power of remembering in words, freeing the patient from the grip of unknowing action; the rule of free association, with its powerful dependence on basic ideas of meaning and language structure; the particular shape of memory as it distorts along the fault lines of language. Theories of language and speech have been central to psychoanalysis throughout its development.
There are two focal papers in this symposium: by Gerhardt and Stinson and by Perez Foster. Although quite different in focus and content, they do carry an agenda: to bring linguistic theory in regard to bilingualism, representation, and code switching (in the case of Perez Foster) and discourse analysis and speech pragmatics (in the case of Gerhardt and Stinson) into psychoanalysts' working understanding.
In Part 1, in this issue, Gerhardt and Stinson ask us to notice that there are unobtrusive but powerful features, “demand characteristics,” embedded in the context and framework of analysis that enter and interact and coconstruct dialogue. Their work reveals one mode through which intrapsychic life is manifest in the forms of verbal interaction.
Among the discussants, Feldman (and Massey in Part 2) offers several important subdisciplines within linguistics: discourse analysis,