This text is the result of the reflections I gradually matured during my life, in particular during my years abroad: since most of my patients spoke a different language from mine, the analytical work was conducted in their native language, english or french.
Working with a mother tongue which was not mine, it has stirred in me a lot of questions in those years: how could I understand my future foreign patients since I learned english and french at school and then I have broadened my knowledge but I am not native speakers in any of them? Would I be able to communicate, understand and make me understand? Would the relationship between us be shallower, less personal, less authentic because of this? Would I be able to understand the cultural differences they proposed me beyond those languages? and which implications it would have on transference (analyst projection of emotions and dynamics from the patient’s internal world)?
What emerged in the evolution of the work with my foreign patients was that the understanding of their lived didn’t make its way into me with translation and/or understanding of each word they said, but thanks to the way I felt myself in the relationship with them.
For example, Tom, an English child of six, dwelt for entire sessions describing the green monsters that attacked and frightened him so much. The theme of aggression materialized immediately in a talk with his parents, when emerged their high level of mutual anger that came with screams and bluster even before children . Yet even if I have been working a long with Tom on the aggressiveness issue of his family, he carried on dwelling in the description of these monsters. The more Tom dwelt on their details, the more I tried to decode all terms, the more I felt unable to understand who they were, what did they mean to him . At one point it broke inside me a strong feeling of loneliness, which accompanied me during our meetings and made me realize that it had nothing to do with our language difference. Rather it had to do with a foreigner in the relationship, loneliness, that needed to be translated into a language understandable for both. I told Tom I felt very alone during our sessions despite my being there with him, and asked him if he felt the same in his life too. My words attracted his attention, leading him away from the story of the monsters and Tom replied affirmative. I told him that maybe he sought refuge in his own world with his monsters because he was very angry. Tom looked at me and told me I had it all figured out.
In working with my foreigner patients I understood I had to take into account cultural differences conveyed by language differences.
I have had some Irish patients leading me to reread things that, in my culture, were considered alcohol abuse in a different social way, not only related to addiction problems. In Irish culture the ” heavy drinking ” is part of being together, of having fun. It is a tradition passed on from their families.
My patients, living abroad, find themselves among countrymen, even with family and children and got drunk to have fun together, to feel part of their world of origin .
With these patients I realized how much I had to be different and delicate in dealing with the “alcohol “issue. All issues related to addiction and substance abuses were present in them, but there was also another “new”, cultural element, that as a therapist I had to learn to modulate my thoughts.
The harmful effects of the substance on the body, could not enter the mind of my patients, they did not exist.
The mere thinking of a funny alternative was a thought very hard to be taken into my patients’ consideration because it meant betraying their culture and their country and therefore being excluded from the community.
It meant becoming stranger to themselves, living in a grey non-membership area.
In the context of a multilingual analytical work, the analyst is also more sensitive to non-verbal aspects of communication.
The patient’s story is heard not only from the point of view of the meaning. It is heard also from the point of view of the sound and poetic : thus it is more easily to catch those emotional and bodily dissonances expressing unconscious patient voices.
Language may be considered a shared experience, a relational one: it allows us to transmit each other what we feel, what we think , and vice versa. And it helps us to understand if one understands us or what one thinks.
The linguistic aspect is an aspect of the relationship, but not the most important.
There are also other channels of communication.
Let’s consider for example the relationship Newborn-Mother.
It is now known that the interactions between a mother and her baby, in the first days, months of life, are possible because, immediately after birth, it is already present in the baby a capacity/need to be in relation: it precedes his possibility to express verbally.
Essentially it is a very efficient system of non-verbal emotional, but facial, vocal and gestural, a system which remains active for the rest of his existence.
Day by day the newborn, who expresses himself through his crying and body, and the mother try to create a common language among themselves which will allow both to feel recognized, understood and loved.
I guess with my foreign patients, but not only with foreign ones, it is set in motion this kind of ” emotional adjustment” which is not related to verbal but to what comes before and traces its origins from the mother-newborn dyad.
I meet with them in a “transitional space” similar in its construction to the dynamics occurring between a child, who is learning to speak and his mother. Mother says a word, the child repeats it in his way and his babbling is the interpretation of the way the mother has shown the world. At that point the mother integrates into her way of speaking the babble of the child.
Language becomes maternal as it contains and outlines the feelings and experiences both of the mother and of the child.
In the studio the analyst interprets, the patient babbles in response to interpretation, the therapist reinterprets, transforming what the patient said: in this way a new meaning is produced .
So therapist and patient come to speak the same language.
The analyst acts as a mother who teaches a new language to the patient, the language to decipher his inner world.
Not to mention that even the silent presence of the mother tongue and the culture of the therapist, as otherness, may affect the meeting.
Foreign is not at least the language that the patient speaks, but the part that everyone has inside, which requires a space and an interpreter in order to accommodate, mean and transform it.