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The subject of Freud and translation can be treated in three parts: Freud as theorist of translation, Freud as translator, and the translations of Freud's own works.
Freud merits to be classed among the principal theorists and innovators of translation, for he gives it a scope and depth unprecedented in history. Freud made translation a unified field concept that encompasses the interaction of intrasystemic, intersystemic, and interpsychic phenomena. More specifically, Freud deemed the following to be translations: dreams; generalized hysterical, obsessive, and phobic symptomatology; para-praxes; fetishes; the choice of suicidal means; and the analyst's interpretations.
Informing Freud's conception of the analyst's interpretations is the secondary use of the German word Übersetzung (translation) to mean transposition. Thus, in two 1896 letters to Fliess (1985, 187-90, 207-14), Freud portrayed the individual as a series of “successive registrations” representing “the psychic achievement of successive epochs of life. At the boundary between two such epochs a translation of the psychic material must take place.” But a pathological reaction, Freud continues, may interfere with this psychic development; such a reaction constitutes “a failure of translation—this is what is clinically known as ‘repression.’ The motive for it is always a release of the unpleasure that would be generated by a translation; it is as though this unpleasure provokes a disturbance of thought that does not permit the work of translation.”
In sum, if the patient may be psychically conceived as an accumulation of translations—as when the hysteric turns into an obsessional and thus becomes a bilingual document (Freud 1913, 319)—the analyst assumes the complementary role of a translator. By means of translations the analyst effects a transposition