How We Got Here

When an adult moves permanently to a second language, writes the French psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva in Strangers to Ourselves, their younger self becomes a nocturnal memory of the new body: a separate entity, an inner handicapped child languishing unused. If all of our psychic development has taken place in one language — the parental and societal prohibitions, the original mapping of one’s body, the nursery rhymes, the early desires, all that we have been before we transferred to a different language, in which we competently and elaborately live today — there will be disturbance. This awkwardness in the psyche, Kristeva argues, can turn into symptoms if ignored, and it’s recommended that bilingual adults find a way to translate the old self into the present. Writing, like art, is one way to do it; undergoing psychoanalysis in the new language is another.

It seems to me that Aleksandar Hemon, the prolific, award-winning Bosnian American...