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“Poetry is what gets lost in translation” (Robert Frost)
“Poetry is what is gained in translation” (Joseph Brodsky)
Salman Rushdie (2009), in his article on film adaptations of novels, argues that the question of essence remains at the heart of the adaptive act. He believes that “As individuals, as communities, as nations, we are the constant adapters of ourselves, and must constantly ask ourselves the question…what are the things we cannot ever give up unless we wish to cease to be ourselves?” (p. 11). Rushdie defines adaptation broadly, as a general term that includes translation, migration, and metamorphosis, “all the things by which one thing becomes another” (p. 3). I think we could add psychotherapy to this list. A basic ingredient in Rushdie's recipe for adaptation, very much like psychotherapy, is its being practiced by persons who understand and care for both the old and the new, “who can help the thing adapted to bridge the gulf and shine again in a different light” (p. 2). In therapy, however, the dearest thing is at stake, the essence of one's very selfhood. According to Winnicott (1963), this very essence, the core of one's true self, faces a fatal threat when it ceases to remain incommunicado. When we ask patients to expose their innermost experience to us, empathy becomes the indispensable ingredient that enables the true self to be safeguarded. And if, according to Winnicott (1963), the therapist–patient environment, like the mother–infant environment, is to be facilitative and not impinging, then empathy means surrendering, in Ghent's (1990) terms, but not submitting the therapist's own subjectivity in favor of the patient's subjectivity.
If the patient's inner core is respected, psychotherapy, like translation, is freed of the dictum “translator equals traitor,” and ceases to be a reductive, restrictive endeavor. Then we can adopt (or adapt!) Paul Ricoeur's (2004) notion of linguistic hospitality, an approach that, both in principle and i