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Ferenczi's Confusion of Tongues (Ferenczi, 1933) provides an opportunity to introduce a discussion of several points about the importance of language in psychoanalysis and its relation to the problems of identification, reality, and interpretation. Now unless I am greatly mistaken, this is not a very widely discussed problem in the Anglo-Saxon psychoanalytic tradition, a fact I personally find somewhat surprising. Indeed, the fact that analysts who belong to a culture that has given the world writers such as Lawrence Sterne, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, who have devoted their lives to contributing to what George Steiner (1967) calls the “revaluation of the linguistic nature of human awareness and behaviour,” have not made this a central theme of their work, I find rather enigmatic. As he further adds,
The Freudian model of human consciousness, the philosophical dramatization and application of that model by Lacan, are linguistic through and through. There are no mute patients or deaf analysts. Philosophy after Frege and Wittgenstein has been “linguistic philosophy” and semantic investigation. The master-builders in modern literature (Mallarmé, Joyce, Herman Broch), the masters of undermining (Kafka, Beckett, Borges) have made of their instrument, which is language, the deliberate theme, the visible object of their art. From Finnegan's Wake to Molloy and the nouveau roman, whether in its minimalist or exuberantly