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“You Americans are almost incredibly romantic.”
“Of course we are. That's just what makes everything so nice for us.”
I quote Henry James with a wink to Dr. Tubert-Oklander who, in his paper that follows, “Lost in Translation: A Contribution to Intercultural Understanding,” challenges my use of the term romantic to describe a certain view of the intersubjective relationship in psychoanalysis. I want to thank Dr. Tubert-Oklander for his very thoughtful contribution to our scientific life and to join him in emphasizing that translation is an important issue for psychoanalysis, not only because we speak different languages.
Heidegger wrote famously of the human condition as a kind of “Geworfenheit” or “thrown-ness”: a condition of being “thrown into Being” (ins Dasein geworfen). It is in something like this sense that we are all not only “lost” but also “tossed in translation”—destined to endure misunderstanding and betrayal, fated to conflict and trauma. Even if we think, in monadic terms, of translation within the “self” to the “self,” we are presented at every level of psychic life with the uncertainty involved in the need to shuttle back and forth from one psychic modality into another. No modality is sufficient unto itself. Even given a measure of intermodal coordination at birth, psychic life is fractious, made up of many parts, each of which is related to a variety of quasi-independent systems functioning in a loosely coordinated way: conative (drive), sensual, narcissistic, sensory-perceptual, motor, affective, proprioceptive, cognitive, and communicative. The psyche can be conceived as the emergent property of these always interacting but still distinct processes (Levin, 1989, 1992). It is rather as if, after falling into dark waters with many shifting currents, there were a