Word, sin and redemption

The place of the father in the mother tongue

Abstract

Psychoanalysis may be read as an immense meditation on the nature of language, in which the former is thought as reconstructing the private myths  of the patient, and the analytical practice may play the role of decoding the significants. This production of significants would refer to a plurality of phrases that only the mother tongue permits to express. Hence, upon reflecting on both the unity of the human soul and the translation of the multiplicity of their operations, the universal tongue is always thought as one, unique, perfectly regular, capable of granting an appropriate knowledge and a full communication between men, between these and the world, and thus, capable of taking them to the idealistic and mythical situation before Babel. In the opinion of the author however, the act of translating involves a betrayal. But, it also involves finding the right, adequate and happy word.  And once found it, it works as the flame that inundates the hermetic darkness of the page. The black print on the white page is the reversed image of our condition as bearers of the drama of Babel without forgetting the hope in the Adamic Tongue. Myths constitute a paradigmatic example of the interplay between light and shadow expressed in Psychoanalysis, Art, Science and Philosophy...