You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
By now, the standard English translations of certain Freudian terms have become questionable in many eyes, if not notorious in a few. Particularly in America, translations of Freud have skewed toward a “scientifization” of psychoanalysis at the expense of Freud's altogether expressive German. We may never reach a consensus on how to render Freud's notion of “Trieb”—biologically connotative “instinct” or figuratively faithful “drive”?—but as Ellie Ragland suggests in Essays on the Pleasures of Death: From Freud to Lacan, the controversy at least clarifies Jacques Lacan's renowned reinterpretation of Freud. That is to say, Lacan insisted on “returning to Freud” because he claimed that Freud's own discovery revolved around such questions of linguistic slippage—nuances which were, ironically, lost in translation. According to Ragland, Lacan's fidelity to the Freudian field would paradoxically lie in inventing translations which were outright “emendations” (p. 1): only by radically re-routing psychoanalysis could it thereby be returned to its original course.
With this as her point of departure, Ragland seeks not simply to derive Lacan's theories from Freud's but, in fact, to juxtapose the two conceptual frameworks in order to illuminate the extent and importance of Lacan's re-readings. The project is not entirely unique, though given Ragland's translational premise, the author may have (unintentionally) raised its stakes. For if translation is so sacrosanct a matter, then the translation or elucidation of the paradigmatic translator, Lacan, whose own theory is couched in the most elusive French—suffice it to say, the task is daunting.