Bilingualism, Culture and Identity

Abstract

The author's main thesis is that language embodies both cultural and individual identity. This has important implications for the psychotherapeutic treatment of bilingual patients: not only can they use their second language as a powerful defence against unbearable memories and feelings, as happened with Josef Breuer's patient Anna 0, but a second language can profoundly alter an individual's sense of cultural and individual identity. This has important implications for the individual's relation to the group and to society in general. If language is to culture what DNA is to genetics, there is little doubt that the language we speak is of crucial importance to the way we relate to the world about us.