You Know How Mami y Papi Get

Inside and outside of sessions, I am a speaker of different languages.

 

The slang of Bronx classrooms and Castle Hill housing projects spices my English, and a New York accent peppers my sentences. For clinicians unversed in the lexicon of BX/NY culture, let me put you on.

 

“Yeah, nah” means “no.”

 

“Mad” is not always a feeling. Patients who “can’t process because I have mad feelings,” may not be talking about anger. They may be communicating overwhelm with too many different feelings. Instead of referring to a loss, they may “take L’s.” Good friends, regardless of gender, are “sons.”

 

When I am found in the transference, I can span the familial titles. In my consultation room, I can expect to be greeted with, “What’s up, bro?” But I can also become, “sis,” and, during particularly meaningful moments of attunement, “my good sis.”

 

¿Y mi Español?

 

My Spanish is a tapestry of a Dominican’s playful musicality and a Honduran’s more punctuated diction. In a 2024 assessment of countries who rank highest in the Mental Health Quotient, a barometer of overall happiness, the Dominican Republic ranked number one. It shows in our Spanish, which features “chillaxing” as a verb. Instead of asking, “what’s new” a Dominican may say, ¡Dímelo cantando! which means, “Tell it to me singing.” A person who perfects a craft is a matatan, which would mean that Sigmund Freud is no longer the Father of Psychoanalysis. In La Republica, the venerated Austrian would be El Matatan de Psicoanálisis.

 

¿Estamos Clorox?

 

That is Dominican slang for “Are we clear?”

 

If Dominican Spanish is the hare, then Honduran Spanish is, by comparison, the tortoise. Like a ticking metronome, my Honduran Spanish is slow and steady, enunciated, and structured. My father’s Dominican words speedily tumble into each other, like toppling dominoes, while my mother’s Honduran words stand at attention. Fellow Hondurans are catrachos, and use voz (think, “thou”) instead of the informal tu. Rather than waste words with prolonged buenos días or buenas noches, they will instead offer a brief and concise buenas.

 

My blended Spanish often invites the quizzical stares and tilted heads of patients grappling to decipher this unusual mishmash. It leaves no room for a “blank screen” analyst. Instead, the perennial questions of “What are you?” and “Where are you from?” are asked as declarations as soon as I open my mouth.

 

“Eres Dominicana. ¿O—Puertorriqueña? No hablas como una Dominicana.”

 

“You are Dominican. Or—Puerto Rican? You don’t talk like a Dominican.”

 

“Sé que eres Dominicana”.

 

“I know you’re Dominican.”

 

Sometimes, in a desperate search to locate me, the complexity of my origins washes out as:

 

“Naciste en Brasil.”

 

“You were born in Brazil.”

 

Over the past decade, I have honed a new dialect—the language of psychoanalysis. Gradually, I find myself increasingly fluent in this language. Psychoanalysis, for better and worse, has shaped and molded my thinking. Yet, in its chiseling, some words confound my senses. This language palette is significantly muted when compared to the vibrant magentas coating my English, or the bursts of flamingo pink saturating my Spanish. Psychoanalytic vocabulary strikes my eye as austere and monochrome, though occasionally punctuated by fiery reds when reading Klein. Its tonality sounds atonal to my ears, accustomed to something more rhythmic and percussive. How else to describe terms such as “object relations”? People, and the richness of relationships, are drained of all color by two words, one of them lifeless.

 

But once I walk through that linguistic portal, my homegrown blend of Spanish serves as a reminder that on this side of the looking glass, we are not objetos. We are gente.

 

Alicia, born and raised in Cuba, dances back and forth between English and Spanish. “When I speak to you in Spanish,” she tells me while softly rat-tat-tatting her chest, “I am speaking from the heart.” During a session in Spanish, Alicia received an interpretation with booming claps, her head tossed back in raucous laughter, and a resounding, “¡Sí! Ya tú sabe, loca.”

 

It roughly translates into English as “Yes! You already know, crazy.”

 

Loca, once stained with diagnostic judgement, takes on new life, morphing into, “Yes, my friend!”

 

Loca, in all its gendered “psychotic-ness,” stands proudly redefined.

 

It is like amiga but, in sounding more barrio, becomes significantly more meaningful. Alicia started treatment fearfully defended because of past thorny relationships. Without a need for translation, I know the shift from amiga to loca is like moving from object to person. With one word, Alicia transforms our relationship into one of deep closeness. While some people can be amigas, I know that for Alicia, not everyone is a loca.

 

Its English equivalent are sessions with patients, often women, who exchange knowing glances with me, smirking, shaking their heads with disbelief, exclaiming, “Girlllllll! Where do I start!”

 

I find myself in awe as I witness how, with each linguistic shift, a vast psychoanalytic landscape unfurls. Themes of sameness, difference, race, class, and gender punctuate sessions, adding a richness and complexity to our exploration. Over time, I realized that embracing these various languages not only facilitates but also enhances the connection that evolves between an analysand and me.

 

It means that sometimes, I sit across from patients as an unnamed Spanglish familiar. I am reminded of Ana, whose origins are rooted in Colombia and was born in New Jersey. After trying to understand a family triangulation, that old Oedipal story, Ana simply says to me, “You know how Mami y Papi get.”

 

It is not “You know how my mom and dad get.”

 

It is not “You know how my mami y papi get.”

 

It is our Mami y Papi.

 

As in There is something about you, dear analyst. It feels like you have sat at dinner tables like mine.

 

Other times, shared languages are not bridges and instead serve as sites of ruptures and chasms. Enrique, away on a family trip, tells a story of shame and renunciation—a man, forced to relinquish a language.

 

“I am considered too dark by my lighter-skinned Dominican family members. Whenever I visit them, they call me Marta’s negrito. It would almost be endearing but there is a caveat that always accompanies it: ‘you’re not really Dominican.’”

 

In response to the complexities of his identity, Enrique disavowed Spanish and settled on learning French, his adopted tongue with ties to neighboring Haiti. He often fielded confused looks from Spanish speakers who, because of his name, mahogany skin, and black curly hair, spit out rapid-fire Spanish, leaving Enrique speechless. “Older Latinos got angry when I couldn’t understand Spanish.”

 

Though we talk over a tenuous internet connection, the lines of transference hold firm. While I am in my home office during a wintry Brooklyn day, Enrique sits on a beach somewhere beneath a warm Atlantic sun. He quietly says, “It’s taken time to admit this, but it’s hard to trust you.”

 

Why?

 

“You are too familiar. I lost my Spanish as a little boy, but pieces are stored in my body, like a muscle memory. Yesterday, I recovered a word. Pérdida. I was unaware I knew the Spanish word for ‘loss,’ but there I was, mouthing to myself, pérdida.”

 

Enrique and I are side by side, two separate boxes inside a Zoom window. Though we are so close, we look at each other from across a great distance.

 

“Spanish cuts deep and I think you know Spanish. I can’t conjugate. Most of my words are gone. What if you hear what I have lost? I don’t think I can ever let you hear my broken Spanish.”

 

For me, language serves as the nexus of psychoanalysis. Each word is a building block, and the diversity of my blocks allows for playful, expansive creations: spanning bridges that can also become labyrinths into the unconscious. The same blocks used to assemble a liminal space can also be engineered into containers that hold the depths of human experience. Sounding different is a gift to psychoanalysis because each language, dialect, and accent is a new conduit through which we can navigate the intricate landscape of the mind. In moving in and out of my languages, I stand the chance of tuning in to a person’s unique frequency. Sometimes, I can match these different, yet familiar, rhythms and sync my words to their song. After all, isn’t that an integral part of attachment —matching a cadence?

 

The “one two, one two.”

 

El un dos, un dos.

 

¿Me entiendes?

 

You feel me?