VII. The Limits of Language

Psycho-analysis has been left a legacy by Ludwig Wittgenstein which, as yet, has scarcely been investigated, let alone exploited. In his great works, the Tractates and Philosophical Investigations, he broached the problem of the limits of language and made two different approaches to it, the first logical-mathematical, the second purely linguistic. He was attempting to define the limits between what could be said and what could only be “shown”. In this brief paper I wish to make a purely psycho-analytical approach to the same problem hoping then to see where it has brought us, first vis-à-vis Wittgenstein and then to examine the light that it may throw on the psycho-analytical method and process. I wish to start with two pieces of clinical description from two patients, each in the fourth year of analysis but facing the problem of the limitations of language from opposite poles.

Mrs D had come through the crucial struggle with the omniscience which had split her emotional life, and recovered the early and passionate love for her parents that characterised her infancy. The split between an area of dutiful object relatedness and secret perversity had severely restricted her emotinality so that she was coolly devoted as daughter, sister, wife, mother, co-worker and analysand. On the other hand her sexuality had a wildly perverse quality, secret and defiant. The third and fourth years of analysis had undone this split with the result that she had become sexually disengaged from her partner and emotionally cold to everyone while a prolonged struggle took place in the analysis to overcome the omniscience, with its attendant delusion of clarity of insight and independence of judgment, which promoted her resistance to dependence upon the mother and breast at infantile levels and in the transference.

When the omniscience yielded and hopefulness began to return, this brought in its train a flood of dreaming and waking states filled with love for her mother and father, and in th