Language and us
From the moment we touch language, we are no longer the same. Language flows like a hidden spirit through the fabric of our psyche. Words are not mere sounds for communication; each word carries a spark of memory, emotion, desire, or wound, sometimes even unknown to ourselves.
Language is the bridge that connects our conscious mind to the depths of the unconscious, a bridge that passes through the foggiest parts of the psyche and brings what has remained silent into presence.
In the darkness of this path, Freud was the first who dared to listen to the echoes of language. He heard how minor linguistic slips opened gateways to repressed desires. A forgotten name, a misplaced word, an unintended sentence—all seemingly insignificant mistakes, but, in their depths, signs of a psyche seeking a voice.
The unconscious, even in dreams, speaks in the language of symbols—complex, multilayered, yet profoundly human. Freud revealed that voicing these unspoken truths is, in itself, the beginning of healing. For once expressed, suffering is no longer alone; pain that finds a word is pain that can be embraced.
Yet behind this individuality, a wider world flows. Jung led us into the realm of the collective unconscious—a place where the legacy of thousands of years lives on in the form of archetypes. Myths that repeat across cultures and times: heroes setting out on journeys, mothers carrying both wounds and tenderness, wise elders appearing at moments of confusion.
Our dreams are rewritings of these ancient tales. Every image in a dream echoes the ancient language of the human psyche—a language that, beyond ordinary words, speaks to us through symbols and images, while the therapist, like a patient reader, sits to decipher its meanings.
Before humans learned structured language, they believed that words possessed power. In the magical mind of ancient humans, the name of a thing contained its essence. To know the name was to possess the being. Even today, this magic lives on in our daily expressions. When we say “may my tongue be silent” (a Persian idiom to avoid jinxing), we are still affirming the belief that words can shape the future.
With the birth of writing, the human mind was transformed. Thought was liberated from the prison of forgetfulness and embarked on a journey from cave walls to modern libraries. Words are not merely labels for the world; they are themselves the creators of our world.
Lacan, with a more radical perspective, lifted the veil on the structural relationship between language and the unconscious. In his view, the unconscious is not merely a space that occasionally emerges through language—it is made of language itself. Our minds are networks of signs and differences, chains of words that construct identity and meaning.
Even when we say "I," this simple word contains countless narratives, definitions, and words accumulated over the years. Dreams, slips, and silences are like texts woven with unconscious threads, and the psychoanalyst becomes the reader who listens to both the words and the spaces between them.
Bion, however, turned to the very moment language is born within us—the place where the infant, though wordless, overflows with raw emotions. Pain, hunger, fear—all formless and overwhelming. The mother embraces these emotions, gives them meaning, and returns them to the child. When she says, “You’re hungry, dear; now you’ll have your milk,” the first seeds of thought and words are planted in the infant’s mind.
Without this tender translation, a person may remain adrift in storms of raw emotion throughout life. The therapist recreates that safe container, granting meaning and language to the raw pain and gently teaching the psyche how to become its own translator.
Kristeva reminds us of the pre-verbal layers of language, where, before structured words, language is born through the music of sounds, intonation, rhythm, and the body’s vibrations. Poetry is where this music is reborn; where the unconscious expresses itself without being confined by rigid grammar.
Sometimes, hearing just a few rhythmic words brings tears without our knowing why, because poetry awakens the semi-conscious language of body and psyche, that which still hides behind words.
Language has two faces: it can reveal and it can conceal. We give ourselves meaning through language, yet sometimes we become trapped within these very meanings. The therapist must listen not only to what is spoken, but also to what remains unsaid; to pauses, repetitions, slips, and unconscious tremors.
At times, the patient’s silence speaks loudest. Sometimes, a single simple sentence unlocks years of suffering—the moment when a patient says, “I think I’m angry at my mother because she left me.” To name is to begin to be free.
In the end, perhaps this is humanity’s secret: we are beings who are born through words, who suffer through words, and who heal through words. Each word is a bridge between the darkness and the light of the psyche.
We create our world by speaking. And every time a voice rises from the heart of silence, the psyche finds a new opportunity for meaning. In that act of naming, hope for liberation is born.