The work proposes that the contemporary analyst can and should listen to the varied languages of man and, with a specific technical stance, help the patient, through intermediary moments, to think what was unthinkable, to name what was unnameable. It departs from listening to the language of the non-symbolic, which depends on the analyst’s capacity for reverie and their capacity to metaphorise the patient’s reports, to propose instead the construction of symbolic forms through the use of scaffolding for thinking. This is what permits the historicising, the placing of the patient’s life in a narrative. If this does not take place, there is an eternal presentification of the traumatic emotional experience, resulting in the “murder of time” (Green).

Ruggero Levy is a Psychoanalyst, Full Member and Training Analyst of the Psychoanalytic Society from Porto Alegre (SPPA), Brasil; Former President of SPPA; Chair of the IPA Working Parties Committee; Keynote paper/Major Lecture at the 50th IPAC in Buenos Aires, 2017; Ex-IPA Board Member from 2011-2013 and from 2013-2015; Professor and supervisor of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul in the Courses of Specialization on Children, Adolescent and Adult Psychotherapy; Author of many book chapters and scientific papers published in regional, national and international psychoanalytic reviews.

This episode is available also in Portuguese

Ruggero Levy (2019) The polyphony of contemporary psychoanalysis: the multiple languages of man, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 100:4, 656-673, DOI: 10.1080/00207578.2019.1636251

Pair of Transverse Flutes, mid-18th century, Johann Wilhelm Oberlender (the Elder) Courtesy Met Museum, New York.