Many people in Britain face the task of speaking something other than English with a great deal of trepidation. Unlike the majority of the world's population, which speaks more than one language as a matter of course, we find the experience bewildering. And that bewilderment is part of the helplessness that characterises a position all too familiar to all of us; as we stumble over unfamiliar words and phrases we are once again infantilised, put in the position of the infans, one ‘without speech’. Stereotypical accounts of Japanese children in the English imagination, that they are silent in class and only speak when they have fully mastered a new language, function as a further reminder that regression to the level of the child who cannot help but display its inability will be the fate meted out to us as we learn another language, here and now.

Psychoanalysis might be useful to make sense of this, and varieties of psychoanalysis that have emphasised the role of language in the development of the unconscious should have something worthwhile to say.

There are five ways it does:

First, another language is another symbolic system. To be in another language is to be in a symbolic space, but space that feels buoyant enough to hold us as we float through it. When we are flattered enough by native speakers that our accent is perfect and that we are perfectly comprehensible to them, there can be moments of ecstatic, omnipotent illusory freedom.