The eluded word Psychoanalysis lodges between the desire to construct a conceptual, scientific and universal language (metapsychology) and the private language to which the patient is invited to participate. This dialectic between the universal (science) and the particular (patient) is analogous to the difference between "culture", with its collective language, and the "individual", with his private and intimate discourse. Both of them (language and discourse) present the risk of becoming a protective shield, what the writer Elisa Canetti called the "acoustic mask", a cuirass that prevents freedom of thought and exchange among people. The word of the universal language and that of the private discourse are eluded by the principle of reality. The task of analytic treatment is to measure the enunciated word on the basis of the demands of psychic and objective reality.
Keywords: Language, acoustic mask, individual, culture, principle of reality