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.
What would a conception of the universal consist of that is not oppressive to particular cultures?
The answer lies in the space of translation.
When a civilization is motivated by curiosity, there opens the way to translation, interest and the desire to know the other.
In relation to neighboring fields of knowledge, the sciences and humanities, psychoanalysis can be viewed as the other, disrupting through its subversive discourse, subjacent to all manifest discourse, in both clinical
Eva D. Papiasvili, Global Chair (North America, Latin America, and Europe), International Psychoanalytical Association Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis; Senior Clinical Faculty and Supervisor, Doctoral Program of Clinical Psychology, Columbia University; Training and Supervising Analyst, Postgraduate Psychoanalytic Society; and Teaching, Supervising, and Training Analyst, Object Relations Institute; 351 Victory Boulevard, New Rochelle, NY 10804
Email:
Submitted for publication December 11, 2025; revised December 12, 2025; accepted December 12, 2025.
practice and theory. In posing the paradox of irrationality as part of a rational account of mental processes, psychoanalytic languages, their words and concepts, necessarily express a range of multiple meanings and contradictions.
Sigmund Freud (1985) grappled with the discrepancy between the limitations of language and an inner vision when he wrote to Fliess, “squinting at ideas deeply offended one of my ideals” (pp. 373–374). He was in good company; some 600 years before him, a poet whose work was dubbed a poetic “psychoanalysis of the Middle Ages” (Papiasvili, 2020, p. 39) wrote, “For it is no easy undertaking, I say, to describe the bottom of the Universe” (Alighieri, 1321/2003, p. 249)