The unusual case of Hebrew illustrates the itinerary of the adoption of a language that is both old and new in the 19th century. What psychical processes underlie the adoption of this new language that will become of mother tongue? Between the desire to forget and the desire to reconstruct, with impromptu reminiscences of the past, this process of adoption and subjectivation attests to a new psychical filiation as recounted by the Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld.
This article deals with the issue of the « mother » tongue of the female child in exile and her bond with the mother during the pubertary process. This is a theoretical and clinical rereading of the case of an adolescent girl who spoke of the loss of her « momma » tongue in relation to the clinical work.
Using the analytical treatment of Sabrina, with reference to the Oedipal model and the notion of the plurality of aspects of the subject, the authors attempt to show the binding that language accomplishes during psychical organization in adolescence, in order to suggest the operational and functional aspect of the adolescent’s narrative. This rational narrative is defensive, both against infantile sexuality and against the disintrication of the drives, while allowing the adolescent to regain access to negation and judgment of truth as he acquires a certain degree of independence from the pleasure principle and also from repression.
This proposal will be supported by the passage from the use of « tu » to the use of « vous » in adolescence : the moment when « one » becomes « several ».
Through a clinical confrontation, the author shows how the listening is rough with the insistence of the purely descriptive account; and exactly when the dead end of the transference – counter transference is made of a sense of remorse. His analysis unfolds also a heuristics inspired by the language of their meeting and their primary language: Arabic. The latter by virtue of its specific structuration allows some words to assume the shape of metapsychological concepts, and at the same time to be a linguistic rest which open onto a lecture of trauma with an exit registred towards the working out of the letter.
Revue semestrielle de psychanalyse, psychopathologie et sciences humaines, indexée AERES au listing PsycINFO publiée avec le concours du Centre National du Livre et de l’Université de Paris Diderot Paris 7