On Helene Troisier review of La violence de l'sinterpretation by Piera Aulagnier

Dear Editors,

As someone engaged in crossing the boundaries between British and French psychoanalysis, both as translator and critic, I am surprised by the review of Piera Aulagnier's La Violence de l'interprétation published in IJP October 2002. The premise for the review, by Hélène Troisier of the Paris Psychoanalytical Society, seems to be the translation into English of this seminal work twenty-six years after the original publication. Yet the review heading, while citing the English title, refers only to the French edition and the review itself, while providing a critical discussion of the original text, makes little of the translation, the time-lapse and the various meanings of this transmission between cultures. Once we begin to sketch out the scenario—the editorial and translation initiatives of the New Library of Psychoanalysis, and the identity of the translator, Alan Sheridan, unmentioned here, who translated Lacan's Four fundamental concepts of psychoanalysis in 1977, four years after their appearance in French—not only can we begin to see a landscape in which the history and dissemination of psychoanalysis takes place and is rooted, but we can also ask questions about processes of transmission and translation against this background. Examples of such questions might be: What is being transferred with the translation, where this word is understood as signifying not solely a passage between two national languages, but as enveloping other forms of passage and of impasse such as transference, which are made readable by the model of analytic listening.

Hélène Troisier refers to Aulagnier's Italian origins and her decision to retain the French patronym of her first marriage. This is an interesting point which might lead us to remember Latin origins and read the French words phantasme, délire, énoncé against the background of their Latin roots. They then take on a materiality and plasticity which the English language is at pains to restore. This point runs deepe