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The most general, but not always fully recognized, difficulty is caused by the analyst's continued use of his customary language as a vehicle for his responses to a regressed patient. This, of course, is only a special case of the problem of language in the analytic situation. There is no question but that any Englishman or any American will analyse an English-speaking patient in English and that patient and analyst will understand each other. Admittedly, the analyst will use with each patient a somewhat different set of words, phrases, and clichés; on the whole, however, most of these ‘dialects’ will be mutually intelligible. On the other hand, they certainly will not be intelligible to a Frenchman or a German; they must be translated first.
Obviously, this does not mean that English, or for that matter German or French, are superior, but it means that they are different languages. The reason for this difference is historical: Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Germans in their early formative stages learnt different languages from their parents.
On the whole, most things, objects, relationships, emotions, and so on, can be expressed equally well in the various languages. I would emphasize that most of them can, because I want to add that some of them can not. This is particularly true of emotionally highly-charged communications. Good examples of this kind are lyric poetry or words sung to music; to translate any of these is an almost impossible task; as is well known, operas are preferably sung in their original language. My favourite explanation of this difficulty uses the idea of the ‘cluster of associations’ that surrounds each word and is different in every language, different even in varying human relationships using the same language. Obvious examples are the almost secret languages of the various trades or professions; slang