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“Words,” Freud said,22 “are a plastic material with which one can do all sorts of things.” Pindar, the Greek poet of the fifth century wrote, “Longer than deeds, liveth the word.” In the book of John we read, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”5
Since words are the principal components of language, and language serves both communication and thinking38 and the discharge of instinctual energies,50,56 it comes as no surprise that psychoanalysts have made studies of words. The purpose of this article is to summarize some of the basic contributions by Freud and subsequent psychoanalysts on the psychological significance of words. The much larger field of the psychology of language and communication will not be discussed.
Words demonstrate the operation of unconscious processes, particularly transformation into presentability, as well as condensation and displacement. Similar to visual or auditory perceptions in dreams, words can be holophrastic, condensing a wealth of associations into a single word, as did the verbal form trimethylamine in Freud's dream of an injection, the first analyzed dream.20 Words demonstrate displacement and indirect representation when they serve as symbols.24
Words depict sexual symbols and the sexual instincts, as do the visual percepts of a dream or the language of myths. Abraham,1 after observing that “language springs in a unique way from the innermost being of a people [and] gives expression to a people's fantasy,” showed that words have gender, being influenced by the sexual instincts.