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Letter to the Editor of the IJP
Dear Editor,
It is with great interest that I read the papers composing the “Analyst at Work” section in issue 2/2021 of the IJP. I would like to add an issue for consideration which I felt has not having been given sufficient attention.
The problems in the translation of psychoanalytic papers and books - whether by Freud or others - into another language (in the beginning from German into English) have been widely studied. This does not seem to be the case for issues around translations of case material in clinical presentations into another language. And yet these translations are an essential step in the preparation of the communication of clinical material in a language different from the original one.
These texts, usually having been translated into English, have become a normal part of many presentations for different purposes. The material has therefore been through one more than the usual number of transformations before being presented. For the sake of simplicity I only mention two steps after the transformation of unconscious material into the communication in the session. The analyst first transforms the original material (what “actually happened” in the session) into a written text (step 1). For the presentation this text is then being translated into a different language - either by the analyst themself or by a translator (step 2). Step 1 has been widely studied, and there is a wide spectrum about the best way to communicate (e.g. to a supervisor) what happened in a session. Of course these presentations always contain much more than the famous “exchange of words”. Step 2 seems to have gained less attention although every presentation and supervision conducted in a language different from the original encounter has to undergo this transformation. The number of translations used in this regard probably ranges in the tens of thousands.
I would like to invite the reader to have a look at how these translations usually seem to be