Introduction: Symposium on the Work of Joseph Fernando

The following papers were originally presented in Toronto on 8 December 2012 at a conference organized by the Canadian journal of Psychoanalysis/Revue canadienne de psychanalyse under the auspices of the Canadian Psychoanalytic Society. This was the second of two such conferences so far, whose purpose is to focus attention on subjects of special interest to Canadian psychoanalysts and mental health professionals.

Both conferences dwelt on the question of trauma. The first (14 May 2011 in Montreal) linked trauma to the problem of translation (Legoretta, Levaque, & Levinsky-Wohl, 2012a, 2012b). Translation was conceptualized in the broad sense—not only as a transaction between French and English speakers, or other languages groups, but also within the “same” language and between different psychoanalytic orientations using similar terminology (see also Levin, 2011; Tubert-Oklander, 2011). The proceedings were enacted in both French and English without simultaneous translation. This meant that the social presence of the other language was inescapable; it generated a new kind of psychoanalytic dialogue. The keynote speaker, Max Hernandez of Peru, emphasized the benefits for psychoanalysis of the Latin American mestizo culture (see also Tubert-Oklander, in press). The conclusion of this multilingual dialogue was that perhaps it is not such a bad thing to be living in a psychoanalytic milieu where different groups literally struggle to comprehend each other—otherwise, the inherent problem of translation in psychoanalysis may become obscured and left unattended, especially in psychoanalytic cultures that misrecognize themselves as homogenous, when in fact they are not.