| Abstract: | Bilingual clients in psychotherapy with bilingual therapists have choices as to which language to use. Psychoanalytic case studies suggest that the use of the second language, learned post childhood, reduces access to deeper emotional material and is mainly viewed as a defensive manoeuvre leading to intellectualizing detachment. Linguistic and neurological studies support the view that the use of the second language can lead to a reduced degree of emotionality in the recall of memories. However, this paper suggests that there is a different and enabling dimension to such clients' language choices. Their own and their therapist's bilingualism and biculturalism open a transferential field where language choices are mapped onto deeper inter‐ and intra‐psychic conflicts and can thus allow access to them rather than defensively hide them. Case material from work with bilingual clients is explored to illustrate this. |
