Panel Report, IPA Congress Boston 2015: Is Translation between Psychoanalytic Concepts Possible?

Dana Birksted-Breen opened the panel remarking that the subject was close to her heart, as it was related to the possibility of translation and communication between different linguistic cultures. She posed a specific question: how can we promote communication without falling into the danger of reductionism, of profound misunderstanding and/or appropriation? All of these are also important questions connected to the IJP at international congresses.

Paul Denis maintained that we should think about two ways of using psychoanalytic models: either we use models as a tool, letting them cohabit alongside each other in a mosaic like relationship; or we unify what we receive from our teachers and from our readings and elaborate our own personal model. This elaboration of a personal model is sometimes explicit but generally implicit.

Furthermore, behind each explicit psychoanalytic model there is an author, who has been particularly sensitive to an aspect of mental functioning and the process of psychoanalytic treatment. New models may correspond to a broadening of the author's field of vision, but other models can correspond to an author's restriction of the field of vision or failure to take into consideration fundamental factors of psychoanalytic understanding.

Denis illustrated the difficulties of translation of one model to another with Kohut's successive theoretical formulations. Denis analysed some of Kohut's early and late concepts and reviewed Anna Freud's different responses to them. Denis referred to the path traversed from Anna Freud's initial favourable opinion of Kohut's foundational article, Forms and transformations of narcissism1, which she found a decisive contribution to psychoanalysis, to her later criticisms of The psychoanalytic treatment of narcissistic personality disorders.2 Anna Freud was troubled by Kohut's view of object-relations and how t