ABSTRACT
For an enterprise explicitly engaged in decoding the latent meanings of human communications, psychoanalysis as a discipline has been surprisingly slow to give weight to the subtleties of speech and language. This history is doubly strange in view of the fact that Sigmund Freud, before establishing our intellectual domain, wrote a distinguished monograph about the neuropathology of language, On Aphasia (Freud, 1891). In much of the psychoanalytic world, through most of our century of existence and despite the Wittgensteinian revolution in philosophy, the medium of communication employed by the participants in clinical psychoanalysis has been implicitly regarded as if it were a perfectly inert solvent that facilitates chemical reactions without having any influence on themas if analytic communication took place by way of some totally unambiguous semiotic code, analogous to the operations of a computer.
