At the junction of our respective approaches (comparative literature and psychoanalysis), we will investigate a case of (non)translation: the “oceanic feeling” expressed by a French writer, Romain Rolland, and its active reception by Freud who seemed altogether to take it up and not quite to know what to do about it – as if he could not cease not to understand what it was about. This case offers the opportunity to swap the representation of translation as the transition from a source language towards a target language for one where it is seen as a relationship based on misunderstanding rather than communication. Far from deploring a loss in this transformation, I consider the act of translating as an invitation to pay attention to what is involved in the disruption of one discourse when it is restated differently elsewhere. This change of paradigm, which implies overcoming a whole series of binary oppositions (free/faithful, source/target) also raises questions about the constitution of the subject: the oceanic is a non-dualism.