I have often tried to understand what a mother tongue was ; we are indeed frequently able to talk various foreign tongues, sometimes with even greater fluency than our own.

The difference can be thought of in terms of affect, the mother tongue carrying along with it the memory of she who first introduced us to speech.

There is however a major difference in neurological terms, it is well known that in a case of aphasia for instance, the mother tongue is the last one to go.

In actual fact, the answer to my question, « what is a mother tongue ? », was quite close at hand, as it was contained in the very wording of it (in the signifier). But our mind is so accustomed to looking for specification in a positive feature that I must say it took me a long time to understand that in this particular case the major feature was a negative one.

My present endeavour is to try and show you that what is to become one’s mother tongue is the tongue in which the mother was forbidden.

It must be kept in mind that it is the forbidden object which makes a language our mother tongue, our « heim ». And it is true that the significance of language is due to this very interdiction ; the poetic potentials of the language and the various lapsi, slips, stumbles introduced by the speaker, make it possible for the native speakers to apprehend a desire which is the same for all of them (as it is the same mother), and which is always a desire for some other thing their language cannot give them, as this other thing is forbidden, eventhough it was the very cause of their desire.

If this irreductible unsatisfaction is the price to pay to be able to speak, I can always choose to remain silent : there is a name for this, mutism.

In this connexion, Wittgenstein remarked that what cannot be said must be kept untold ; but it is precisely what is kept untold, this desire that cannot be expressed clearly, which incites us to always speak more, probably in the hope of being eventually recognized.

Wittgenstein himself seems to have abandoned this kind of hope, choosing to be a homosexual, i.e. to refuse this form of otherness so specific of desire, which is always the longing for some other thing.

The repression of this forbidden desire constitutes a stock of unconscious meaningful units whose emergence in my speech in the form of lapsi, slips, stumbles, betrays my desire as it causes it to be heard.

The emergence of the unconscious meaningful units voices the nostalgia for the forbidden object ; and insofar as I have no free command over them and they remain out of my control- doing as they please – the unconscious can then appear like an allegory of my mother’s body coming forth in my memory but forever out of my reach.

The mother tongue then is that tongue in which, owing to the functioning of the signifier, one’s desire for what cannot be is both maintained and voiced.

When speaking a foreign tongue, the return of my unconscious signifiers can no longer be voiced as the expression of a desire ; they have become, even to my own ear, no more than simple vocabulary or syntax mistakes.

The music of the mother tongue (the accent that remains of it) is the only thing left to recall the unspeakability of the desire that I now find myself condemned to. This is what is so comical about handbooks for conversation for foreign learners : They introduce castrated speakers, i.e. speakers with needs all right, but unable to express any desire.

And yet, it is possible for one to speak a foreign tongue with more ease and fluency than one’s own, as though one had triumphed and done away with the barrier of the signifiers and were in a position where anything had now become sayable.

But this incidence of mania is a clear indication that the mother included in that language neverwas forbidden for the given speaker since (a) it is a foreign tongue for him and (b) he triumphs in the possession of it : the result, as we know, is short of being convincing.

It is also possible to resist learning a foreign tongue, on account of the depersonalization involved. Or one can even develop a different kind of neurosis as one changes languages : one, say, obsessed in his mother tongue, could then become an hysteric with phobic features when speaking a different language.

One of the advantages of our elaboration here is to show the possible dissociation between the real mother and the mother we can call the symbolic mother, i.e. the one included in the vernacular. There are indeed many cases when the real mother does not speak the language one might call the « official » language : migrants, for one, or again, as was the case with Freud, when a foreign wet nurse replaces the mother.

Immigrants thus often feel it is their duty to integrate their children in the language, not their own, spoken around them. But this entails the risk of not being recognized as parents by their own children.

To be sure, the traditional possessive character of the Jewish mother has no other origin.

She knows she has to renounce her motherhood for her children to integrate into a -for her – foreign language, and she knows this will eventually lead to her being supplanted by another mother : but the least she expects is for her sacrifice to be recognized : the sacrifice of a mother who wants her son not to be in want of a mother.

Does this mean that we would also have to make a distinction between the real father and the symbolic father, the one at work in the language actually spoken ? Quite so, since being deprived of one’s mother through the learning of a new language is clearly attributed to what Lacan calls the Names of the Father, i.e. those signifiers supposed to stand for that which is forbidden.

This is the reason why speaking a foreign tongue implies a real form of depersonalization, since, if one wants to remain loyal to the host language and avoid mania, it amounts to choosing a new mother and a new father as well.

In any case we now find ourselves familiar with the categories of the real and the symbolic. So far as the imaginary is concerned, we know how children play with it concerning their parents: their imaginary parents are those whom the child expects to be almighty ; the imaginary is the way to conceal castration.

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Would this suggest that the repressed signifiers form, a language in the unconscious and doing that away with that repression would enable one’s desire to find at last free and full articulation in its original tongue ?

This may have been what Anna O had in mind when she chose to speak English with Breuer.

This was Jung’s idea when he could hear the voice of our ancestors lore in the unconscious.

It may also have been Ferenczi’s idea when he heard in the unconscious a call for tenderness as he himself was confronting the hard necessity of desire.

In any case, we can easily imagine that for the Jews, those perennial exiles and permanent speakers of foreign tongues, the unconscious may very well have seemed to be a haven for the secret fatherland of their desires. It would then be enough to give free rein to the unconscious to enable the embalmed and forbidden language to come to the fore again, and their desire to fulfil itself in a fatherland at last reconciled.

Such an ideal might even account for their involvement and interest in psycho-analysis.

As we know, these hopes were not to be satisfied, and if at the end of his treatment, the subject may have gained some freedom vis à vis his symptoms, this certainly does not mean that he now has hold on his desire. One’s desire will always remain under some unconscious regulation.

The reason for this is that the unconscious is not organized like some oppressed tongue that it would be enough to set free for one’s desire to fully articulate itself. It is rather a language-like structure.

in so far as it is a chain of elements made up of all parts of speech; and it is the whole of this which is affected by repression, from the sentence as a whole to the letter, including the ward and the phoneme as well as items of punctuation.

The unconscious chain constituted as a language-like structure, « structurée comme un langage » as Lacan puts it, there is no voice likely to utter the desire from its abyss ; it takes a hysteric to pretend she is inhabited by a god or a demon expressing himself in her bosom.

For the chain itself is like mere writing, it is not phonemecized, even though it can include a sentence, a ward or a phoneme. And the subject must talk and vaticinate a lot, like for instance in psycho-analysis where he lends his voice to his unconscious thus enabling the latter to be heard via the disturbances it introduces in conscious speech.

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My first statement about a mother tongue was to characterize it, from the point of view of the speaker, as the language where his mother was forbidden to him, and where this interdiction entailed a third party, the father. This was an occasion for me to introduce the distinction between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary parents.

But one of the merits of Lacan was to show that the effect felt by the subject – what the theory calls castration – was not a simple effect of his bringing in his parents into the language.

In so far as the signifier is characterized (a) in terms of pure difference, as was shown by de Saussure, and (b) as always referring to some other signifier, the origin of the defective condition of our desire is not to be found outside the language itself : since meaning will always miss this other thing that the signifier keeps referring to and that eventually becomes imagined in its cleavage (« coupure »).

As is well shown in psycho-analysis, the function of the father is to stop this infinite referring of meanings and to designate the phallus as the finite object, meant for satisfaction.

And this is the reason why the woman is always involved in the pretence of having to represent it, and this is why she is a lot more phallic than men. And this is also why there is no sexual relationship since it is the phallus which has become the object of pleasure (jouissance).

The pact commanded by the symbol is that the subject should accept to lose the being he thinks can give him satisfaction in order to derive pleasure (jouissance) from the phallus only ; this is also the price to pay to be loved by the father. In contrast, a mother’s love is unconditional since it is motivated by the more or less incestuous wish of a child who would not be castrated.

But in spite of this effort to guarantee a lineage with the symbolic father, my desire remains desire for some other thing, thus giving back to the language its original property of always being Other, in so far as the signifier can only function by referring to some other signifier; like for instance in a dictionary, where there is nothing to define a word but other words, there is nothing in the language to guarantee my identity. The subject we are dealing with is a permanent exile.

The hysteric takes pride in it, claiming she is always somewhere else. The obsessed suffers from it and endeavours as best he can to suppress the subject. What psycho-analysis could achieve is to enable the subject not to organise himself in some withdrawal from the world but to take part in it with all his heart : however painful, there is no other one.