ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is a theory whose language, created by Sigmund Freud, has been deeply altered by the English translation. Based on the English translation, the language of psychoanalytic theory has undergone a deep de-semantisation of what Freud implied in inventing a language for his new science. In D. W. Winnicott's thinking, Deutung—interpretation—abandons the realm of the analyst's omnipotence in knowing everything about the patient's unconscious feelings, triebs, and desires, and instead recognises the limits of the analyst's understanding. With the expression "reflects back", the paradox of the individual who discovers himself through the other finds its virtual point of refraction in the interpretation that "must include a feeling that the analyst has that a communication has been made which needs acknowledgement". The very first stages in the analysis of Viviana, a forty-three-year-old woman of marked intelligence and sensibility, were characterised by constant declarations of her insuperable difficulty in speaking, in allowing a more intimate form of communication.
