You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Choosing a framework that can adequately celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis must have been a daunting task. Not only has the Journal published more than ten thousand articles over the course of its history, but tectonic changes in both psychoanalysis and the broader culture have shifted our discourse profoundly, challenging even the possibility of finding or creating any kind of thematic unity.
Faced with this, Dana Birksted-Breen, the Journal's editor for the past fifteen years and editor of Translation/Transformation: 100 Years of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, came up with an inspired choice.
“Translation,” Birksted-Breen's chosen theme, was at the heart of Freud's most important goals for the discipline he created; in at least two very different ways it shaped the history of psychoanalysis and of the Journal. First, translation was central to Freud's clinical project; it is one way of describing what happens when we make the unconscious conscious. At its origins the goal of psychoanalysis was to make it possible for us to translate ourselves to ourselves.
Second, translation (in the more everyday use of the word) was necessary to Freud's project of changing the world, of bringing about the third Copernican Revolution (Freud 1916-1917, p. 285). If the world was to be changed, psychoanalytic ideas had to be disseminated beyond the small group of German speakers who had gathered around Freud from the beginning. The dissemination of ideas across cultures—and, crucially, the
control of how those ideas are received and develop—falls squarely within the translator's job description.
Translation operates at the multidimensional intersection of these various forces; the emerging vector will determine what psychoanalysis is, as a praxis, a theory, and an institution. Accordingly, the two connotations of translation (and, occasionally, their relationship to each other) lend unity to the very different papers chos