Stopped language development in a 6-year-old girl

Abstract

A study of the causes which provoked a cessation of acquisition of language and anorexia in a six-year-old child, Martha. At the beginning of her treatment, she only pronounced three words: maman, papa and “ata” (this last word being acontraction of “aqui” and “esta”, — “that’s it” or “here it is”). She had learnt them at the end of her first year and during her mother’s second pregnancy. The cessation of language acquisition took place after the birth of a little sister, and in relation to the learning of sphincter control.

The treatment lasted two and a half years, with four sessions a week, and two interruptions for summer holidays.

The conclusion is reached that in Martha’s case, refusal to speak signified refusal to give, opposition to her surroundings, and revenge on her mother.

Her profound refusal of the exterior world was expressed in her muteness and in a serious anorexia. Refusal to speak and to eat enabled her to paralyze magically both projection (words) and introjection (food), which would have led to a serious schizophrenia if her difficulty had not been analyzed. Refusal to pronounce words constituted a means of retaining within herself the excrements which, in real life, she had had to yield by force to her nurse. She immobilized words because they had acquired for her the significance of explosive and destructive faeces. The fact that she had recourse to this symptom was conditioned by her mother’s forbidding her to pronounce the name of her sister, whose birth \vas the occasion of multiple losses for her. The fact that her mother struck her when she pronounced her sister’s name for the first time was felt by her as a prohibition on the reparation of what she had damaged in her phantasies. She was thus condemned to live in a ruined world inside herself, a world which she controlled omnipotently in refusing to talk.

Reparation was made impossible by the intensity of her greed, increased by a sudden weaning and the jealousy produced by her mother’s pregnancy and its consequences. In refusing to pronounce her sister’s name she omnipotently denied her existence. Her mother’s prohibition on pronouncing this name confirmed her in her belief in the omnipotence of speech.

When the analysis awoke in her the belief in her capacity for reparation, she was able to begin to talk; if the could use words to reconstruct and repair, the danger of destroying with words was less.

The capacity for canalizing destructive phantasies in new symbolizations, the projection of her terrifying images on the analyst, and the idealization of the latter, were a first step in freeing words from these phantasies, and the processus of language inhibition ceased to be indispensable.