ELF as the Medium in the Psychoanalytic Discourse Community: Science and International Dissemination

The current political debate on the use of English as Lingua franca (ELF) among people from different lingua-cultural contexts in influential domains – i. e. ELF as part of the more general phenomenon of EIL (Seidlhofer 2004) – mainly orbits around the basic questions whether English is to be described as a "Tyrannosaurus Rex" let loose in the world to gobble up other languages and, still more, as an imperialist killer (Swales 1997, Ives2006, Harvey 2005), or else, if its very spread can act as a paradoxical motivation for speakers of other languages to insist on their own language and culture (House 2007). A more neutral perspective is shared by linguists engaged in the building/studying of corpora such as ELFA ( ELF in Academic Settings – Mauranen 2003) and VOICE, (Vienna-Oxford International Corpus of English – Seidlhofer 2004) on spoken ELF interactions, and, still, as the inter-culturally oriented Italian CADIS which analyses textual variants arising from the use of English as a first/ second language, or lingua franca of the scientific community (Gotti 2006). Undeniably, the ever growing number of people with a degree of facility in English – predictably 2 billion in 2015 as compared to 250 million in 1952 ( Graddol 2006, Crystal 1997) – is a world historical phenomenon with massive political consequences, that is meeting increasing opposition. Both in the ‘decolonising’-oriented circles (Harvey 2005, waThiong 1981), and in academia, especially in France and in Germany, there is a growing disinclination to acknowledge English as The Language of Science (House 2007). Yet, in Germany, in the 1920s the outstanding and self -confident Freudian Psychoanalytic Community resorted to English when necessary for the dissemination of their works, which were frequently published in The British Journal of Medical Psychology (now published as Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice) – even though in those years German was a prestigious language for science. English was the official language also of the 2006 Baden Baden Conference –Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatics: Mind, Body and the Bridge Between, which has served as a benchmark for where the field stands at the present time – thereby confirming the 1920s linguistic choice. This study has used the 2006 Baden Baden Conference papers and some preceding and subsequent works as corpus. Our data indicated that the use of English by the Non Native Speakers of the psychoanalytic community tendentially conformed to academic/scientific linguistic standards and genres, but greater pragmalinguistic variants in terms of authorial identity are apparent as compared to other scientific domains. In the Psychoanalytic community argumentative (not rarely belligerent) debate played an essential role, and still does; this appears as one major reason for such variations. This study will provide both qualitative and quantitative data of such phenomena and provisional explanations for them, in the context of scientific dissemination via ELF.