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Mother Tongue?
I've been working with Willy, a man in his 80's and a refugee (in his childhood and along with his mother, father and younger brother) from Hitler's Europe. Our psychotherapy has focussed largely on Willy's fraught relationship with his wife of many years--herself a holocaust survivor--around their difficulties with each other, with their children and their grandchildren.
A year or so ago, his oldest daughter died. I had come back from a vacation to his numbness and literally unexpressible grief. It's his inability to experience his grief--and what it took for him to move forward--that I want us to think about.
His daughter's death had not been unexpected. She had had advanced liver disease--the consequence of intravenous drug use earlier in her life, and the consequence, Willy himself had acknowledged many times, of a life of promiscuity and drug abuse. "I lost my daughter many years ago," he would say.
But now he was also saying, "There must be something wrong with me. I can't cry. I can't mourn...." "I don't know, doc," he would say, "What's wrong with me?" Over the weeks that followed he would lapse into a numb silence and then into his repetitive questioning and fruitless self-examination. I sat with him, I felt for him, I tried to give him a way to think about himself--in all the ways psychoanalytic clinicians do: how he might feel; how I might feel, what it all might mean: the frustrated anger with his daughter, the disappointment, his self-protective distancing from his own feelings.... All to no avail.
Then in a session some months after the event, Willy was talking about his wife and their early relationship. He was remembering the early sweetness of married life, how much his wife had wanted a baby girl, a little "meidlele," he said in Yiddish, and how when the baby was born, he said, "We had our little meidlele," and at that his voice broke and he cried!
There was nothing I needed to say at that moment; I offered him the box of tissues; I took one myself.
So the question: What happened there? Why did the word in Yiddish, and his saying it aloud, allow things to move forward--forward with the emotional process of grieving, and, subsequently, forward with the interpretative process as well?
Surely there's something to say about this question from a range of psychoanalytic prespectives. My own feeling is that what is most interesting here is the nature and power of early language--how we talk to ourselves in our intimate and ungarded moments--but I'm eager to hear what others might think.
--Henry Seiden
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