That is what is in the beginning – the Promise, not the Word. Adam Phillips The Beast in the Nursery: On Curiosity and Other Appetites, 1999

The Dynamic Self

In the previous chapter I proposed that the lens of psychoanalytic theory might permit a different perspective on the phenomenon of anxiety, as one among many factors in second language acquisition, than second language acquisition research or social theories on their own might allow. In addition, in its ability to expand the scope of what is understood by the term, psychoanalysis may have a helpful contribution to make to an examination of the possibility that one of the manifestations of anxiety, within the second language learning process, may be silence. More broadly, what I ask of psychoanalytic theory in this chapter is to address the problem of how the process of discovery – or creative construction and re-construction – of a self might be understood in the general context of second language acquisition, and within the phenomenon of silence as part of that process. I ask whether the work of acquiring a second language might consist in part of somehow weaving the threads of a new self, a new identity, into the tapestry of the pre-existing one or, perhaps more profoundly, of creating a new 'second-language self' that alters, replaces or coexists with the 'original' one. Does the individual acquiring a second language also acquire, or create, a second world view, perhaps even a second identity? What might this imply for the first world view and the first self?