What if language learning, in the sense that it involves a loss of a former, pre-language self, and by implication second language learning as a transformation from first-language self into second-language self, were considered as a process parallel to those that Freud names mourning and melancholia? In this theoretical model, the lost or disappointing object would be neither a loved person nor an idea as such. Rather, it would be part of an individual's own unconscious - the aspect of the self that is lost either in the transformation from non-speaking to speaking self or, in the case of the shift from first to second language shift, in the movement from one language to the second. Might the learning that provokes the transformation be itself a shattering force? Could the psychical activity of learning (including language learning) insofar as it involves both an encounter between the external and the internal in their various aspects and the consequent loss of some aspect of the internal, invoke a process not unlike mourning and - depending on the degree of the disruption - even approach melancholia?
(p. 50)
What shatters the language learner's relationship with the object that is, or was, the pre-language omnipotent self, or the first language not-quite-omnipotent-but-nevertheless-expressive self, is the learning that a new language, a new means of expression, is called for. But, as Ehrman and Dornyei (1998: 185) point out, individuals may resist learning, and they may do so through silence, because learning 'requires rejection of one's own deficiency'. That is to say that hand in hand with learning that one needs a new language goes the inferences that the old language (or the pre-language state), and therefore the former version of the self, which lived either without language or within the first language, are no longer sufficient - are even, somehow, wrong. This learning - this shattering - echoes an earlier learning, an earlier disruption, namely the realisation of the self's separateness (and the corresponding inadequacy of the unseparated self) from its mother. And further, much as that earlier realisation marked a kind of loss of the previous self (perceived as united with the mother), the acknowledgement of the need to revise the first-language self to include a second language which it now needs to make itself known - even when there is no loss of the mother tongue as such - is a reminder of the loss of the mother as part of the self. Thus the self disappoints itself.
(p. 54)
Thus, despite what is gained by acquiring language, the old longing for omnipotence is not completely repressed: it does not die, and furthermore it is re-awakened, or remembered, or even re-experienced, in the acquisition of a second language. This is so not only because of the longing for the omnipotence of the previous, pre-language state, but also because, with respect to the L2 environment and relative to that second language, the self that has not yet acquired it is, in effect, without speech. That is, as the primal unspeaking infant is to the speaking child, so is the self of the first language to its later manifestation as speaker of the second language. Although the stakes are somewhat different in second language acquisition - the self has already sublimated its omnipotence fantasy - what is paralleled is the reluctant relinquishing of a previous linguistic potency. And the disappointment of this later disruption recalls the earlier one.
(p. 55)
Granger, Colette A. (2004) Silence in Second Language Learning. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
