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minds-of whatever native language-after having lost their mother
tongues. As Kathleen Kelley-Laine stated in her introduction, psycho–
analysis is about translating psychic pain into language; and "how" one
reaches the trauma that is located in the unconscious, how one gets to
pour this anguish into a language that turns it into a transformative
experience, is what counts.
Judit Szekacs had found that her Hungarian patients were able to
trust her more readily than the analysts they had worked with previ–
ously, because they shared their native language. That was why she
started London's Multilingual Psychotherapy Center (MLPC), which
refers people to therapists who speak their languages-and are able
more readily to recreate the cultural and emotional climate of their
childhoods. As both therapist and patient, together, revisit and revive
what was lost in transition, in the move from one culture and language
into another, they are able to clear up at least some of the misunder–
standing and non-understanding that then had occurred.
At previous international meetings of psychotherapists many individ–
uals had told their stories. Now, they expected to draw conclusions
from these stories, and to learn-via emotional rather than intellectual
communication-how to truly connect with one another, and to create
a feeling of kinship. They went on to ask what language they had best
rely on to converse after verbal forms and structures have been lost and
must be reconstructed; and in what domain of the soul they had best
search to find words that have lost their meanings because they no
longer carry their affective and emotional charge. inevitably, Hungar–
ian was the lingua franca of this soul language, not only because both
Szekacs and Kelley-Laine were trained in the relatively emotional Fer–
enczien psychoanalytic tradition, but because they found out that their
inferences struck a chord with everyone who had been uprooted in
childhood. (Kelley-Laine is planning a follow-up meeting in Paris at the
end of this year, another one was held in Budapest last February, and
more may well follow later on.)
Exile, whether under circumstances of war, persecution, natural dis–
aster, or other traumatizing events, entails a fundamental loss of iden–
tity. Kelley-Laine found that the panicked child inevitably seals off its
"lost childhood" along with its "mother tongue." Like Peter Pan, she
observed, the child gets locked up in the sort of "Neverland" of eternal
youth, and gets "anesthetized," while a self that remains "young, inno–
cent, and heartless" is being constructed. This early self can be refound,
but given the initial trauma, this happens with much difficulty, and only
in the transference relation. Clearly, Ferenczi's flexible and emotionally
