ABSTRACT
This chapter is centered on clinical observations made on patients whose analysis is conducted in a language different from their own mother tongue. In psychoanalysis, one discovers new meanings through a long and effortful path of associations. Thus, the recommendation is to minimize the real presence of the analyst, to stimulate the unfolding of fantasies. It is generally only one culture that is forcefully transmitted by the parents, a fact that appears very evident in the case of the patients referred. In the processes of analysis, a conflicted relationship to language in general and specifically a dramatic emergence of ambivalence in regard to maternal figure. Within the experience of a psychoanalytic encounter for these patients the knowledge of the impossibility of translation is a preformed, specific limitation of that encounter. The foreign language was an unarticulated message, a measure of our difference, a music of the analytic moment.
