IMPLICATIONS OF LINGUISTIC IDENTITY FOR THE PSYCHOTHERAPEUTIC PROCESS

While our globalized world has increased the prevalence of multilingual patients and therapists, multilingualism seems to be a topic that remains unspoken in psychotherapy training programs as well as in institutions that provide psychotherapy to the wider community.The lack of awareness about the specificities of the multilingual experience can cause therapists to misunderstand their patients' emotional functioning and to misdiagnose them.This paper aims to offer a psychoanalytically informed framework that helps us understand how language is at the core of the individual's identity -a complex structure of stable and fluid/mutable elements which mediates the interaction between external and internal worlds.It also aims to address the implications of multilingualism for psychotherapeutic practice, by using clinical material from psychotherapy sessions with monolingual and bilingual patients.This paper delves into the particularities of the subjective experience of people who make sense of themselves and the world in more than one language, and argues that an awareness of the linguistic characteristics of each patient promotes better psychotherapeutic practice, whether conducted by monolingual or multilingual therapists.The paper then extends this exploration to monolingual therapeutic dyads, emphasizing that even in such dyads, there may be "different languages" being spoken, as the same words can have distinct emotional connotations depending on each person's lived experience.The paper concludes that the therapist's evaluation of the patient's language profile is of the utmost importance in any psychotherapy process, given the implications of this aspect of the person's identity in their sense of self and their mode of being in the world.