Freud and the Spoken Word

Speech as a key to the unconscious

Ana-Maria Rizzuto

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138858107
• eBook ISBN: 9781317512288
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

There is extensive literature on Freud and language; however, there is very little that looks at Freud's use of the spoken word. In Freud and the Spoken Word: Speech as a key to the unconscious, Ana-María Rizzuto contends that Freud's focus on the intrapsychic function and meaning of patients' words allowed him to use the new psychoanalytic method of talking to gain access to unconscious psychic life. In creating the first 'talking therapy', Freud began a movement that still underpins how psychoanalysts understand and use the spoken word in clinical treatment and advance psychoanalytic theory. With careful and critical reference to Freud's own work, this book draws out conclusions on the nature of verbal exchanges between analyst and patient.

Ana- María Rizzuto begins with a close look at Freud's early monograph On Aphasia, suggesting that Freud was motivated by his need to understand the disturbed speech phenomena observed in three of the patients described in Studies on Hysteria. She then turns to an examination of how Freud integrated the spoken word into his theories as well as how he actually talked with his patients, looking again at the Studies in Hysteria and continuing with the Dora case, the Rat Man and the Wolf Man. In these chapters, the author interprets how Freud's report of his own words shed light on the varying relationships he had with his patients, when and how he was able to follow his own recommendations for treatment and when another factor (therapeutic zeal, or the wish to prove a theory) appeared to interfere in communication between the two parties in the analysis.

Freud and the Spoken Word examines Freud's work with a critical eye. The book explores his contribution in relation to the spoken word, enhances its significance, and challenges its shortcomings. It is written for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists, Freud's scholars and academics interested in his views on the words spoken in life and in psychoanalysis.

Argentine born Ana-María Rizzuto trained in psychoanalysis in Boston and was for forty years in the PINE Psychoanalytic Center Faculty and is Training and Supervisory Analyst Emerita. She has made significant contributions to the psychoanalysis of religious experience and has written in national and international journals about the significance of words in the clinical situation. She has written three books and lectured about her work in North America, Latin America, Europe, and Japan.

1 INTRODUCTION

Freud, psychoanalysis, and the spoken word

DOI: 10.4324/9781315718200-1

In his essay The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud describes an imaginary conversation with an “Impartial Person” who wants to know what an analyst does to help a patient other doctors have been unable to heal. The answer is brief and to the point: “Nothing takes place between them except that they talk to each other” (Freud 1926, 187) (my italics).¹ When his interlocutor shows some contempt to his response, Freud continues: “Do not let us despise the word. After all it is a powerful instrument; it is the means by which we convey our feeling to one another, our method of influencing people. Words can do unspeakable good and cause terrible wounds” (pp. 187–88).

This book is about the ‘except’ of that ‘nothing’ except talking with one another. It is about Freud's deceptively simple sentence specifying the treatment a patient undergoes: “[The analyst] gets him to talk, listens to him, talks to him in his turn and gets him to listen” (p. 187), a description that encompasses the entire process of carrying out an analysis. For the patient and the analyst talking and listening are the only instruments they have in their efforts to elucidate the sources of the analysand's suffering and symptoms.

Freud defends the function of the spoken word as a powerful instrument for change, but clarifies that the effect of analytic exchanges is not based on any magic power words might be thought to have; the treatment consists rather of a continuous process of listening and talking that may last a long time. Today, regardless of the development of many different psychoanalytic schools and theoretical approaches that have emerged since Freud's time, we observe that all psychoanalysts use the spoken word as their only instrument to access the analysand's private reality. This obvious fact contrasts with the limited attention most practicing analysts and theoreticians have paid to the contribution the spoken word brings to the unfolding of the analysis and the transformations it elicits in both analysand and analyst (Litowitz 2011). I believe it is time for us to give our full attention to the function of the spoken word in our clinical work and in our theorizing. Although the task is a vast one I decided to start at the beginning and read the entire corpus of Freud's writings with the goal of grasping how he defines the many complex functions we perform by employing the spoken word. As far as I know, no other analyst or scholar has carried out this exploration. The closest approach is the scholarly examination that John Forrester, a philosopher of science at King's College Cambridge presented in his book Language and the Origins of Psychoanalysis (Forrester 1980). This work focuses primarily on language and the connections between the psychoanalytic understanding of neurosis as propositional structures based on Forrester's conviction that “language is the central concern of psychoanalysis” (p. x). I disagree and in what follows replace this principle with my own conviction that the central concern of psychoanalysis is spoken words and what they are capable of revealing about the private unconscious life of a person.

The words patient and analyst exchange with each other differ from ordinary conversation. The analyst aims at assisting the patient to give words to the unconscious representations that would remain unknown to him though they constitute the core of his psychic life. They must be articulated into personally experienced living words capable of bringing back to psychic life the moments felt to be unbearable and hence repressed. They become the indispensable referent to open up the closed area of unconscious processes. In ordinary spoken exchanges the most frequent referents are either actual realities or consciously known psychic processes. In both instances, analytic or ordinary conversation, the structures of language mediate the process of achieving understanding between two interlocutors while accessing meaning remains a psychical event between two people beyond the mediation of language.

My analytic training went no further than mentioning Anna O's name for her treatment with Breuer, the “talking cure.” We took it for granted that patient and analyst speak to each other but did not explore the changes introduced in ordinary speech necessary to achieve our goals. The reader may ask what prompted me to focus on speech in the analytic situation. The answer is complex and requires that I describe my journey as an analyst.

I was born in Argentina, grew up in Córdoba, a university city, and was trained as a teacher before entering medical school. In the 1960s I taught child and adolescent development at the university. In 1963 the dean of the local Roman Catholic seminary asked me to teach a course to his advanced students about the psychological foundations of belief and pastoral care, focusing on belief in God and the internal struggles and consolations that people experience in relating to the divinity. The literature on the subject was scanty; the course had never been taught before. I collected what was written on the subject in several academic disciplines and ended by focusing on Freud and Jung as the authors who had carried out a serious exploration of the subject. Soon I came to see that Jung's complex symbolic and archetypal elaborations were fascinating but far removed from the concrete experiences of ordinary people. Freud won me over with his brilliant clinical elaboration of the role of the parents in the formation of the God-representation. The child, Freud proposed, uses his experiences with his parents (in his appraisal the father in the first place) to represent an invisible God by linking the divinity to the parental representations, including the affects and convictions the child associates with his imagos of them. This is how I came to be interested in Freud's notion of object-representations.

I used the course to learn about the local children's conceptions of their God. The seminarians were teaching catechism classes to youngsters in the latency stage and I asked them to take notes about what their pupils asked or said during class in relation to their own experiences. After listening to the words of many children I became hooked on the representational mind, in particular one capable of representing and relating to a non-visible and non-directly experiential being called God. A researcher was born in me at that point and I decided to dedicate my available time to study Freud's ideas on internal representations and, most important, to carry out comprehensive clinical research to see if I could prove whether Freud was right or wrong.

In 1965 I immigrated to the United States and settled in Boston the following year. There I began my research in earnest. I published my first paper, Freud, God, the Devil, and the Theory of Object Representation (Rizzuto 1976). My book The Birth of the Living God: A Psychoanalytic Study (Rizzuto 1979) presented the results of a comprehensive and thoroughly documented study of a large number of patients and their dealings with God. The book starts with a disclaimer: “This is not a book on religion. It is a clinical study of the possible origins of the individual's private representation of God and its subsequent elaborations.” The second chapter offers an enlarged revision of Freud's theory of object-representation in relation to the divinity; the fourth chapter, “The Representation of Objects and Human Psychic Functioning,” reviews the existing psychoanalytic literature on the subject up to 1979 and presents my own ideas.

The endless hours spent talking and taping the patient's words on the subject and the much longer time spent in reflecting upon them (it took me ten years to elaborate what I had learned) opened my eyes to an obvious fact: the only access to parental or divine representation is the patient's own words. I formulated truly unusual incomplete statements such as “What I like the most about God …” or “I feel that what God expects from me is …” The responses I heard as my subjects completed the sentences – deeply felt and sometimes carefully, sometimes hesitantly presented – articulated their relationship to a personal God they had never experienced except in the recesses of their representational mind. Now I was hooked again, this time on the power of words to grasp and bring to light the private or hidden realities of human experiences.

In the meantime I had become a psychoanalyst and was seeing several patients in analysis. It so happened that at one point I had four analytic patients who suffered from eating disorders. Working with these patients alerted me to their peculiar manner of talking without talking about themselves. Pierre Marty and Michel de M’Uzan in Paris had described such a phenomenon as pensée opératoire, while in Boston in 1973 Peter Sifneos introduced the term alexithymia, a name derived from Greek meaning “no words for feelings.” These other authors from the field of psychosomatics did not consider the dynamic motivations present in the patient's difficulties in articulating their experiences in words. Meanwhile, my patients were conveying to me some of their feelings about words. A young anorexic woman almost chanted a mantra in response to my words saying, “Those are only words. They do not mean anything to me.” Similarly a woman in her forties with a twenty-year history of binging and vomiting explained repeatedly with patient impatience, “This is like a play. You say your part and I say mine. But we don't mean anything.” These patients taught me much about their conditions and showed me that a significant part of their pathology stemmed from emotional deprivation in their early relationships and in particular from disaffected patterns of communication in the family. My first task thus consisted in helping them to explore the parental imagos of their childhood so that they could learn to talk about themselves with me and published what I had learned (Rizzuto 1988).

Now, to fully deserve my name as a practitioner of the “talking cure,” I had to wrestle with words and their complexities. Somehow I learned of Freud's pre-analytic publication about words, his 1891 monograph entitled Zur Auffassung der Aphasien. Eine kritische Studie (Freud 1891). I read the 1953 English translation (Freud 1891) and felt I was not grasping what Freud was saying. I decided if I were going to understand it properly I had to study the original German. The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute allowed me to make a photocopy of the original edition in its library. Tackling Freud's German text was no easy task. He wrote it for the neurologists of the time who were immersed in the task of creating neural models for the function of speech and its most blatant pathology, aphasia. While Freud's monograph was carefully organized and tightly reasoned, the technical vocabulary presented a steep learning curve. Nevertheless I was determined to understand what Freud had said to override most of his fellow theorizers. I needed colored pencils, tracking lines, cross references, and other technical aids to finally understand what he was saying. Once I did, however, I became a devotee of the monograph, greatly appreciative of the richness of its concepts and the many original ideas it offered in relation to object-representations and the neural/psychical structure of the spoken word. I published my detailed analysis of several aspects of it in five papers: “A Hypothesis about Freud's Motive for Writing the Monograph On Aphasia” (Rizzuto 1989); “A Proto-Dictionary of Psychoanalysis” (Rizzuto 1990a); The Origins of Freud's Concept of Object Representation (‘Objektvorstellung’) in His Monograph On Aphasia: Its Theoretical and Technical Importance” (Rizzuto 1990b); “Freud's Theoretical and Technical Models in Studies on Hysteria” (Rizzuto 1992); and “Freud's Speech Apparatus and Spontaneous Speech” (Rizzuto 1993a).

Freud presented a conclusion in the monograph: “All stimulations to speak spontaneously come from the region of the object associations” (1891, G. p. 81; E. p. 79, my translation, my italics). It was just what Freud and I needed to connect internal representations with spoken words. From this moment on my analytic listening was always on the alert, waiting for such connections in the material as I was hearing it. As usual, my patients were my teachers. One taught me about the psychical significance of pronouns and I wrote “First Person Personal Pronouns and Their Psychic Referents” (Rizzuto 1993b). Other patients educated me about their surprising metaphors and I shared what I had learned in “Metaphors of a Bodily Mind” (Rizzuto 2001). Then I felt the need to integrate the developmental point of view and affect with my knowledge about words and representations and the analytic process. I wrote two papers on the subject: “Speech Events, Language Development and the Clinical Situation” (Rizzuto 2002), and “Psychoanalysis: The Transformation of the Subject by the Spoken Word” (Rizzuto 2003).

When I presented my ideas about the spoken word the discussants talked about linguistics and the contribution it makes to psychoanalysis. I was aware that the psychoanalytic literature up to that time contained few articles dealing with the function of words, although some had appeared in the mid-1990s that focused on this topic. It became clear to me that Jacques Lacan had preempted the field, dividing those working in it into his eager followers and his determined opponents. Lacan had presented his landmark paper “The Function and Field of Speech and Language and Psychoanalysis” to the Congress held at the Rome Institute of Psychology in September 26–27, 1953. It was published in La Psychanalyse (Lacan 1956). Lacan had been influenced by Roman Jakobson, a structural linguist, and by Ferdinand de Saussure.

It was Lacan's original intention to return to Freud's work, revive the best of his theorizing, and go on from there to offer a new understanding of the function of language in psychoanalysis. Soon, however, the evolution of his own ideas led him to frame a conception of the unconscious that differed from Freud's foundational concept. Lacan “asserts the supremacy of the signifier, and argues that the signified is a mere effect of the play of signifiers,” thus suggesting that the unconscious is primarily linguistic as reflected in his famous dictum that “‘the unconscious is structured like a language’” (Evans 1996). By contrast, Freud's discoveries had led him to see the unconscious as the realm of representations.

Lacan lectured at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and became involved with many prominent intellectuals, academics, and students. These scholars took to Lacan's ideas and read Freud to reinterpret his work in the light of Lacanian concepts. Lacan and his followers were among the few focusing on the role language plays in psychoanalysis. He offers elaborate, abstract and, at times, algebraic formulas and theoretical constructs to elaborate on the role of language in psychoanalysis. He published o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Freud, psychoanalysis, and the spoken word
• 2 Breuer, Freud, the talking ladies, and the monograph On Aphasia
• 3 Hysteria as asymbolic aphasia
• 4 The function of the spoken word in The Interpretation of Dreams
• 5 Pliable words, scenes, and the unconscious
• 6 Freud’s technique: translating repressed scenarios into words
• 7 Freud’s theories: repression as gaps in consciousness and the words to fill them
• 8 How did Freud talk with his patients?
• 9 Conclusions
• Index