Mother Tongue and Other Tongues

Dr Ali Zarbafi is an Anglo-Iranian Jungian analyst and supervisor and member of the Society of Analytical Psychology with thirty years’ clinical experience. He is a founder member of the Multi-lingual Psychotherapy Centre. Ali works in the NHS and private practice. He has written and given talks on trauma, the refugee experience, and social dreaming, and has an academic background in international relations and Middle Eastern studies. He is co-author (with John Clare) of Social Dreaming in the 21st Century: The World We Are Losing (Karnac, 2009).Shula Wilson has been a practising psychotherapist and supervisor since 1991. She is the founder of SKYLARK (1995–2012) an organisation that offered counselling and psychotherapy for people affected by disability. She is a founder member of the Institute for Psychotherapy and Disability, and a consultant psychotherapist at St Thomas’ Hospital and Great Ormond Street Hospital, where she is also a lecturer and supervisor. She is a committee member of Multi-lingual Psychotherapy Centre. Shula is the author of Disability, Counselling and Psychotherapy – Challenges and Opportunities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) and has written chapters and articles on disability and psychotherapy for various publications.

In old Vienna, Sigmund Freud treated his very first patients, all of whom lived nearby, in his native German tongue. But, today, psychotherapy has become a far more globally diversified practice, both culturally and linguistically, posing many challenges and opportunities. In this wonderfully rich and readable book, Ali Zarbafi and Shula Wilson have assembled a magnificent collection of colleagues from Canada, France, Germany, Iran, Israel, Japan, the United States of America, and Zimbabwe, to examine the nature of multilingual psychotherapy from the perspective of both the patient and the clinician. I devoured this book in one sitting and I recommend it very highly indeed.

• AcknowledgementsAbout the editors and contributorsIntroduction by Ali Zarbafi1. Language of the mountains, language of the sea: living with exile and trauma as a journey between languagesEsti Rimmer2. Living in-between languages and culturesAli Zarbafi3. Childhood, spoken and written selvesNatsu Hattori4. When the mother tongue is contaminatedPatricia Gorringe5. Outre-mer et la langue de ma mèreMonique Morris6. Silence, dissonance, and harmony: integrating the multilingual selfCédric Bouët-Willaumez7. Return to Berlin: my forbidden mother tongueEdna Sovin8. Once upon… a silenceGiselle China9. The challenge of 'home'Shula WilsonIndex