5 - Ohé, the Silent Teenager

Summary

In this chapter, which takes a psychoanalytical approach, the author references Jean-Paul Hiltenbrand’s work on untranslatability in situations of migration and bilingualism, and presents the case history of a thirteen-year-old adolescent who is the third daughter of a Korean mother and a French father. Silent and depressed, Ohé was brought for counselling by her mother, who learned French at university on arriving in Paris, where she settled as a young woman. When she became a mother, she chose to speak to her daughters only in French. The therapy sessions focus increasingly on the analyst’s intuition that something is lacking in the adolescent’s Mother tongue, leading to the hypothesis that the daughter’s difficulties might be related to the mother’s dilemma of untranslatability in certain crucial areas of experience. This is related to the adolescent’s passion for Japanese cartoons. To Ohé, it seems, Japanese has come to represent a kind of halfway house in which the maternal dimension can be found between the second Mother tongue and the first (albeit missing) Mother tongue.