Commentary

In a paper presented last July at the Berlin IPA Congress, Gail Reed suggested that a work of translation intervenes — and should actually be fostered — between psychoanalytic theories, models and idioms. I believe this to be right in more than one way. Provided we agree to consider the many levels at which translation occurs and the many meanings this notion conveys, translation can indeed be seen as one of the central tasks to be carried out in our professional work.

The subject is too complex to be dealt with satisfactorily in this short coda. I wish to underscore, however, how the three beautiful pieces presented above substantiate the view that a genuine psychoanalytic exchange can transcend geographical, linguistic, cultural and theoretical barriers to focus on central issues of psychoanalytic work itself. Certainly, a work of translation was needed to yield such results. Obviously, some ingredients were also necessary to make this happen, the first one being, in my opinion, a thorough faithfulness in presenting clinical material. Not just accuracy in reporting what was said or done, but fidelity to the experience as a whole, its atmosphere, its flavour. Dr Yardino is to be commended for having wonderfully fulfilled this requirement and provided scenes of her analytic practice that the two commentators (and, I believe, most of our readers) were able to acknowledge as genuine, rich and thought-provoking. Many explicit and implicit features of Stella Yardino's report convey the ‘feel’ that she went through the sort of clinical experience that, in spite of the unavoidable intervening variables, any analyst can recognize and learn from. Her translation of the clinical experience into a written account is so convincing that I imagine a researcher of the analytic process easily parsing its many elements on some scale or checklist and quantifying in some manner the various components that give this report its qualities. What we have here instead is our more familiar w