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This article reviews the panel held at the 20th Annual Spring Meeting, Division of Psychoanalysis (39), American Psychological Association, April 6, 2000, San Francisco. The panelists were Judith butler and Adrienne Harris, and the moderator was Jeanne Wolf Bernstein.
Adrienne Harris, in her paper “Trance and Transference: Linguistic and Identificatory Aspects of transference Phenomena,” criticized the distinction often made by psychoanalysts between words and acts and the subsequent valuing of words over acts. In dividing speech from action, a mind-body split is perpetuated. Harris argued that language, or language that communicates effectively, is very much a bodily experience. Talk that cures is talk that closes the gap between speech and act. Citing the work of vygotsky, the speech act theorist Bahktin, and the contemporary linguists Lakoff and Johnson, Harris asserted that it is because of its physicality that speech cures.
This bodily materiality of language is expressed in what Harris termed the trance aspect of transference. In Freud's effort to distinguish psychoanalytic method from suggestion and hypnosis, he emphasized the separateness of analyst and analysand and the possibility of objective