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7 - The Sea of Language

from Part III - The Second Mother Tongue as a (M)other Tongue and the Return to the Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2022

By
Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt
Edited by
Sara Greaves  and
Monique De Mattia-Viviès
Sara Greaves
Affiliation:
Université d'Aix-Marseille
Monique De Mattia-Viviès
Affiliation:
Université d'Aix-Marseille
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Summary

‘The Sea of Language’ is the first chapter of Volume 1 of a two-volume work entitled Quand Freud voit la mer: Freud et la langue allemande (When Freud Sees the Sea: Freud and the German Language). The author, as writer and translator, explores how the founding tenets of Freudian psychoanalysis are not concepts that happen to have been framed in German, but were derived from the way German parts of speech are rooted in the body and thus grounded in the German language itself, which is not a language of abstraction, as French admirers of German philosophy tend to believe, but of the body in space and in motion, a language of the common people going about their everyday life. The author’s study of the essence of German takes him from poetry to philosophy to the ‘ultimate perversity’: the language of the Third Reich, which he briefly envisages as a return of the repressed within the German language, possibly intuited by Freud. Through his analysis of German, he illustrates how the character of a language can lend itself to perverse manipulation and how individuals can find themselves rejected by the Mother tongue that had so far nurtured them.

Keywords

Freudian psychoanalysisGerman languageFrench languageThird ReichMother tonguelanguageHegelphenomenologyWilhelm von HumboldtLeibniz
Type
Chapter
Information
Language Learning and the Mother Tongue
Multidisciplinary Perspectives
 , pp. 123 - 136
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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