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The man who finds his country sweet is only a raw beginner; the man for whom each country is as his own is already strong; but only the man for whom the world is as a foreign country is perfect.
-Hugh of St. Victor (twelfth century)
An understanding of the ways in which exposure to cultural pluralism contributes to identity and personality formation can enhance not only a better comprehension of intrapsychic conflict and interpersonal or social interactions, but also the development of psychoanalytical theory itself and its clinical endeavours. In this paper I shall approach the subject from an angle that has emerged from a longstanding study conducted together with S. Argentieri and J. Canestri (which has resulted in a book) on the mother tongue and foreign languages in the psychoanalytic dimension. It was by chance that our attention was led to clinical situations in which the analyst and the patient did not communicate in the same mother tongue, but in what was a second language for one or for both of them. When we started to think about these situations, we realized that the issues that were emerging went far beyond the solely technical or theoretical aspects of the analytical relationship, and raised questions related to many other fields of knowledge. The clinical setting between multilingual analysts and patients offers a particular scenario for understanding the links between the external and the internal world, inasmuch as language lies at the heart of human psychical development. In our profession we are constantly confronted, on one hand, with the discovery of the unconscious-that "other" foreign language in ourselves-and at the same time, with the discovery of the Other (or the meaningful others) through the processes of self-object differentiation that pave the way towards identity formation.
Tzvetan Todorov (1982), a contemporary linguist, illustrates in his interesting book La Conquête de l'Amérique the link between crosscultural experience and the issue of "alterity." Certainly the discovery of America represented the most powerful impact that European culture experienced through the discovery of the different "other." Todorov's careful study of the available chronicles enables him to discuss how-through the capacity of understanding the Other-western Europe was successful in assimilating the other, in this case the Indians, actually doing away...