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One of the most distinctive aspects of current French psychoanalysis is the importance a relatively large number of practitioners attach to language. Lacan's influence can be measured in the clinical situation in this way. Not that Lacan invented a technique of words, but he emphasized the fact that Freud did. And that this had been a bit forgotten. This is why analysts of the Freudian and Lacanian schools use Freud's opinion that words are the main “tool” of psychoanalytic treatment as a point of reference. Perhaps this is as much as all these French analysts agree on. Words belong to everyone, but each person has a way of using them that is unlike any other. So when I tell you about an analysis, and of how I understand dreams, I can obviously do so only in my own name.
However, before moving on to the clinical experience, I will stop a moment to consider some remarks by Freud, in which he talks about words as “tools” for treating the soul. Here is what he says at the beginning of a text originally published in 1890:
… words are the essential tool of mental treatment. A layman will no doubt find it hard to understand how pathological disorders of the body and mind can be eliminated by ‘mere’ words. He