This article looks at the case of a young child brought up in English and with whom I work in English, even though this is neither the language of his parents nor mine. His language is primarily made up of repetitions of ready-made phrases, reflecting his parents’ difficulty in cathecting their child’s erotic body beyond his survival. My English, a language I learnt, probably repeats this rather cold way of speaking. In the course of the work, a movement emerged in which the English became less comprehensible, leading to exchanges in joyful gibberish. The pleasure of making sounds and playing appeared. This gave me reason to hope that a language of pleasure would emerge in place of useful talk in response to a need, and that in the end this child would develop an ambivalent and addressed language, less under the sway of the death drive. The mother tongue, acquired and not learnt, is anchored in the child’s body and the pleasure of exchanging beyond words, and thus makes drive fusion possible on the model of masochism as the guardian of life.