Is Translation Possible?

Translation is always interpretation and the psychoanalyst is a translator/ interpreter. The psychoanalyst translates the unconscious. Words, images, affects, bodily signs are translated into interpretations. Mahony (1980) describes Freud as “one of the great thinkers and innovators in the domain of translation. […] for he gives the concept a scope, extension, and depth in his work that appeared nowhere previously in history” (p. 462).

Freud's ‘talking cure’ translates blocked emotions, hysterical symptoms, and impulses into words. But just as there is no one-to-one equivalence of words and sentences between national languages, so too there is no one-to-one equivalence between the productions of the patient and the possible translation by the psychoanalyst. In the gap between the two resides the whole field of psychoanalysis in its many cultural, theoretical and personal variations. It is inherent to the principle of overdetermination that various ‘translations’ can only each give a partial perspective. “If the psychical mechanism consists of stratification of transcriptions, then one can also assume the coexistence of multiple transcriptions or translations” (Hinz, 2008 p. 122).

Psychoanalysis is essentially polyglot, with its ‘social’ variations but also the variations of each dyad who come to learn each other's language through back and forth translations and often the construction of a common language, which would need translating to an outsider. The transformation/translation/ interpretation will be filtered through the particular psyche, theory, personal preference of the individual psychoanalyst. Ferro (2009), for example, following Bion's conceptualization of ‘transformation’ describes the many ‘languages’ which can be used to describe an aspect of the ‘hologram’.

Translation is sometimes near to construction when the original trace seems little available as in the non-neurotic structures where the work of ‘figurability’ is done between patient and analyst (Bot