Barry O’Donnell – A Foreign Tongue
 
The Letter Issue 66-67 (Autumn 2017/Spring 2018) Pages 93-106
 
This paper is a response to the question: Why was psychoanalysis founded by an emigrant? The paper proposes that speech being strange to the speaker is fundamental to psychoanalytic practice. This has consequences for the transmission of psychoanalysis. 
 
Keywords: subjectivity; speech; strange; lalangue; Gaeilge.
 
Psychoanalysis occupies itself with what is experienced as strange in the most intimate aspect of ourselves, our speaking. 1 Whether a dream, a slip, a symptom or a joke there is a quality of it being a foreign production, albeit one of my own subjectivity, a product alien to my conscious sense of myself. It is in this direction that I am drawn in response to the question: Why was psychoanalysis founded by an emigrant?