ABSTRACT

This groundbreaking, provocative book presents an overview of research at the disciplinary intersection of psychoanalysis and linguistics.

Understanding that linguistic activity, to a great extent, takes place in unconscious cognition, Thomas Paul Bonfiglio systematically demonstrates how fundamental psychoanalytic mechanisms—such as displacement, condensation, overdetermination, and repetition—have been absent in the history of linguistic inquiry, and explains how these mechanisms can illuminate the understanding of the grammatical structure, evolution, acquisition, and processing of language. Reexamining popular misunderstandings of psychoanalysis along the way, Bonfiglio further proposes a new theoretical configuration of language and expertly sets the future agenda on this subject with new conceptual paradigms for research and teaching.

This will be an invaluable, fascinating resource for advanced students and scholars of theoretical and applied linguistics, the cognitive-behavioral sciences, metaphor studies, humor studies and play theory, anthropology, and beyond.

chapter |8 pages

Introduction

Toward a new transformational model of language

chapter 2|19 pages

Recursion and metacognition

chapter 4|16 pages

Dreamwork

The precognitive formation of language

chapter 5|24 pages

Speech errors and humor

In principio non erat verbum

chapter 6|16 pages

Language, consciousness, and identity

chapter 7|18 pages

Neuro-psychoanalysis

chapter 8|10 pages

Language and mimesis

chapter 9|11 pages

Language and mirror neurons

chapter 10|14 pages

What is grammar?

chapter 12|14 pages

Metaphor and psychoanalysis

chapter 13|9 pages

Psychoanalysis and linguistic relativity

chapter |11 pages

Conclusion