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The talking techinque of psychoanalytic healing has been justified primarily by its usefulness in redeeming neurotic persons from imaginary terrors and fortifying the anxious ego in new necessity-conditioned liberties. This practical merit of the Freudian technique found support in the old traditions of all peoples which encourage the getting of “loads off the chest” by intimate talk. The Christian confessional is only one of the popular devices by which mere talk has been employed for mental therapy.
In the following paragraphs will be seen another justification of the method formalized by Freud from the unconscious wisdom of folklore, which he was always pleased to discover or rediscover. More exactly, the material gathered here demonstrates how the perception of the therapeutic utility of bare words by different peoples is rooted in their languages.
Trying to trace the etymology of the English verb and noun talk, the researcher runs into strange difficulties. Beyond its immediate Anglo-Saxon source and the kindred western Germanic forms it is hard to find related phonemes without extensively varying denotations. Thus in Slavic tongues we have the manifestly related noun tolk meaning interpreter; but there is also the Slavic verb tolk signifying beat or thrash, which cannot easily be connected with our English word. American slang may associate them by the joking reference to speech as a meeting of breeze or wind. However it is plain that the Slavs are not applying a comic metaphor when they give tolk its definition of cruelty. Perhaps their contrivers of the term had in mind what we call “tongue lashing”? This suggestions is backed by the fact that the closely related language Old High German had the allied word tolc=wound. This reminds one of another Slavic