‘Circling back’ – Language, Losing and Finding

Foreword

This paper is a summary of “Mother Tongues and Other Tongues: Presenting the work of the Multilingual Psychotherapy Centre”, a seminar given by Cédric Bouët-Willaumez at the Association of Jungian Analysts on 7 May 2024.

Introduction

Psychotherapy occurs in a multilingual context when at least one of the participants has some ability to express themselves in more than one language. When we consider this situation, we usually ask ourselves: “How is therapy affected when there is a constant and obvious presence of the cultural dimension?”, or “How does translation work intrapsychically and interpersonally?”, or “How can the therapeutic dyad use switching between languages adaptively or defensively?”

I suggest that there is another angle that can be used to examine the multilingual situation, which is a dynamic born out of fundamental paradoxes inherent in language and akin to the cycle of rupture and repair, which I will call “circling back” .

1- ‘Circling back’ in language acquisition

There are two paradoxes inherent in language, which are initially apparent in its acquisition during infancy: first, even though it lives in the minds and words of individuals, it is a tool “intended” for the group; second, putting words to our experiences can be construed as a destructive act, even if it creates new relationships to self and others. We can use the idea of “circling back” to make sense of these paradoxes and see how they apply to psychotherapy in a multilingual context.

 Language works from outside-in

Evolutionarily, language emerges first out of the necessity to communicate and build communities: expression of thought is a secondary feature (Everett, 2017). Similarly, at the level of individual development, verbalisation of perception of the outer world will precede verbalisation of feelings (Katan, 1961). In fact, verbal productions are given meaning by the interaction between mother and infant: the infant produces a sound, the mother will assign it a meaning, which she will communicate back to the infant, who will internalise it (Edgcumbe, 1980). This process is ongoing throughout life: our verbal productions circle back to us via the other, acquiring and refining meaning in the process.

Language bridges the boundary that it creates

Having a word represent a thing means that we no longer have that thing in its original state - what Stern calls “amodal experience”. Each word acts indeed as a double-edged sword (Stern, 1985), because it makes distinctions and categories that don’t exist in nature but that we use to communicate. So, with language, we create and bridge a boundary at the same time. A ‘circling back’ occurs when we lose an experience and ‘get it back’ in verbal form. The amodal experience is broken up, processed ‘outside’ (with tools that are rooted in community and relationship) and returned to us in a form that builds up a verbal self. The operation of meaning is therefore a departure and a return at the same time. 

2- The multilingual individual in psychotherapy

Translation in the multilingual psyche

The multilingual individual will have gone through this paradoxical language acquisition process more than one time. Because any language can become a language for the unconscious (Velikowski, 1938, in Amati-Mehler et. al., 1993), the circumstances of these successive or simultaneous processes of rupture and repair, of ‘circling back’, will shape the object relationships that the individual will create in each language.

Between these inner spaces that each language reaches, a “transitional space between languages” (Birksted-Breen, 2010) appears; its geography is perpetually redefined by the shifting relationship of one language to the other, in a constant process of mutual perspective-taking. In other words, the circling back that takes place between us and the world also takes place within us. 

This is not a specificity of the clinical work with a multilingual individual: Birksted-Breen states that “analysis is essentially polyglot”. The multilingual situation ‘merely’ allows us to see how different parts of the self articulate. Psychotherapy takes place in this transitional space, where translation is attempted more of less successfully.

Adaptive and defensive use of code-switching

The most obvious clinical phenomenon in a multilingual therapy is code-switching, that is, switching between languages. Eduardo Tesone (1996) explains that switching to a second language is a way to “avoid the heat” by lengthening the path from thing-presentation to word-presentation. This is widely seen as both the expression of a resistance and a means for a patient or a therapist to access material that is too painful to verbalise in their first language.

The adaptive or defensive use of code-switching (or its possibility) is the bread and butter of the multilingual clinic. Language choice will always be a snapshot of the state of play in the reciprocal perspective-taking between languages, and it is useful – indispensable, even – to concentrate on this during treatment. But, by avoiding heat (Tesone, 1996) or conjuring up more contemporary mental representations (Movahedi, 1994), do we bar access to the areas that treatment must access to heal?

3- Does a multilingual context create a therapeutic impasse?

The position expressed by Iranian-American psychoanalyst Siamak Movahedi (1994), feels like a natural theoretical and clinical end point for code-switching. He states indeed that: “The royal road to primary process thinking certainly goes through the signs and signals of the mother tongue”. He adds: “I maintain that the working through of early childhood conflicts – particularly preoedipal issues – should ultimately be carried out in the language that bears the inscriptions of the early object relationships”.

We can think usefully about this problem by doing two things simultaneously: first, by questioning how important the retrieval of memory in any particular language is to the effectiveness of psychotherapy; second, by returning to our circling back metaphor and broadening the way that we use it to understand not just how we express ourselves but how we relate to each other.

Circling back and play

As shown by all authors of Mother Tongue and Other Tongues (2021), multilingual practice aims at creating conscious relationships between those aspects of the person that each language helps structure and express. At best, this will be done playfully (Rimmer, MTOT, 2021).

Winnicott tells us (1971) that psychotherapy “takes place in the overlap of two play areas”. There is a ‘circling back’ in play itself, which is akin to the dynamic described by Stern, to which we have referred above: from a state where he is merged with an object and perceiving it subjectively, a baby will repudiate it, re-accept it and perceive it objectively.

One of the goals of psychotherapy is to facilitate and use the creation of this transitional space, and this is most obvious to the multilingual speaker. Amati-Mehler states indeed that “the clinical setting between multilingual analysts and patients offers a particular scenario for understanding the links between the external and the internal world, inasmuch as language lies at the heart of human psychical development”.

A complex concept of Home

Renos Papadopoulos (2002) explains that “Home is both the perceived locus of origin as well as the desired destination, the goal, the end, the telos”. Home is two things at once, and we exist in relationship to both.

I don’t think that the quality and effectiveness of the therapeutic encounter rests on the therapist’s capacity to accurately evoke the memory of early object relationships. What is more important with respect to psychotherapy is the ability of the therapeutic pair to be together in this transitional space, which is not some fixed place in the procedural memory, but a changeable in-between - the interpersonal as well as the intrapsychic. 

Conclusion

The existence of a multilingual context in psychotherapy does not bring about a situation that is substantially different. Rather, it shines a light on the fact that we come to language in the context of our developing ability to manage a complex and playful relationship to home. Multilingual practice acknowledges and explicitly works with the fact that we are constantly circling back, aware of our thrust away and towards it, in which meaning itself is created and resides.

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