Authors' Introduction to the English Edition

Understanding means translating.

For a few decades now, notably thanks to the work of Steiner (1976) and of Antoine Berman (1984, 1985) and Paul Ricoeur (2003) in France, translation has become a discipline of the greatest importance and of particular interest for the psychoanalyst. He cannot fail to ask himself if his writing, like translation, is also, as Ricoeur puts it:‘a creative betrayal of the original, but an equally creative appropriation by the language of reception’. That is to say, of what is unconscious in his patient, of what the analyst says to him about it, including the theoretical elaboration of his interpretation via writing; then, of the reader's understanding of his text in the same language; and, finally, of what becomes of the original text translated into another language. By multiplying so many ‘creative betrayals of the original’, what remains of the analyst's initial intuition that is inseparable from the setting, and of the highly particular psychic state that is produced in an analytic session?

Taking this complexity into account, and having given the matter much thought, we have finally concluded that, notwithstanding its character as a neologism, introducing the term figurability into the English psychoanalytic terminology to name what we call in French figurabilité was unavoidable. It is a notion that we have been developing since 1983 on the basis of Freud's use, throughout his work and in an identical manner, of the term Darstellbarkeit. He does this notably in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900: S.E. V, 339) in the formulation Rücksicht auf Darstellbarkeit,1 the title of the sub-chapter D of chapter

VI, the French translation of which has been modified three times. The one that has lasted the longest is La prise en considération de la figurabilité.

Unlike in French, the translation into English of Darstellbarkeit has, to the best of our knowledge, not posed