Conrad's Mystic Writing Pad: Translation and the Unconscious Labor of the Text

Translation has long been a generative concept for psychoanalytic theories, beginning with Freud's polysemic deployment of the German “Übersetzung” to denote diverse, albeit related terms like “translation,” “transposition,” “metaphor,” and “transference,” whose complex affinities of these terms were highlighted by Patrick J. Mahony in an inaugural essay on translation and psychoanalysis (1980/1987). Mahony intriguingly relates to translation as “a unified field concept which illustrates the interaction of intrasystemic, intersystemic and interpsychic phenomena” (p. 3), but he stops short of articulating the dynamics of this interaction, nor does he explore the relations between the textual and the psychic as they come to the fore in translation. The following discussion would offer one possible conceptualization of these relations through a literary prism, engaging with Freud's essay on the “mystic writing pad” (1925) as an interpretative model for a reading of three novels by Joseph Conrad. The distinctive commonality of these novels is, I suggest, a form of self-translation or mistranslation, which may yield some productive insights into the unconscious labor of the text.1

The most recent and extended post-Freudian engagement with the nexus of translation and the unconscious has been offered by Jean Laplanche, whose early work, written in collaboration with Serge Leclaire (1972/1999), inaugurated a life-long project of recovering the “Copernican” thrust of the Freudian revolution by reformulating Freud's initial conception of the unconscious as the “drive for translation” [a traduire]

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the Israel Science Foundation (ISF) for its generous support of this research project.