Faculty Bibliography

The presence of two separate languages, each with its own lexical, syntactic, semantic, and ideational components, can complicate psychotherapy with proficient bilingual patients. If only one language is used in therapy, some aspects of the patients emotional experience may be unavailable to treatment; if both languages are used, the patient may use language switching as a form of resistance to affectively charged material. The authors suggest that monolingual therapists should carefully assess the degree of language independence in bilinguals in order to minimize its impact on therapy. They conclude that study of bilingual patients may provide important insights into the nature of the therapeutic process.

The English-speaking clinician frequently evaluates and treats patients whose mother tongue is not English. This paper summarizes some of the evidence supporting an emotional-detachment effect associated with speaking in a second language and describes its implications for the psychotherapy of this population.