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What can language do? Watching the documentary Rendez-vous chez Jacques Lacan, 2012, I came upon a beautiful story on the use of language by Jacques Lacan in psychoanalysis.
A former patient of him, Suzanne Hommel, recalls a session during which she mentions to Lacan that she wakes up every morning at 5 'o clock: "It's at 5 o' clock that the Gestapo came to get the Jews in their houses."
The moment she says so, Lacan jumps up from his chair, comes towards her, and caresses her very gently on the cheek. She understood the gesture: "Gestapo" became a “geste à peau” - it was an “Appel à L’Humanité.” The pain was still there, Suzanne Hommel says, but it had transformed.
