Hello and welcome to the first issue of Sitegeist since the pandemic struck in 2020. Our theme for this edition is translation, with four diverse articles and related pieces that explore the concept of translation and psychoanalysis in its widest context.
In Montreal, 1979, Patrick Mahony was one of the participants amongst the assembled philosophers, professors of literature and psychoanalysts who had gathered to discuss autobiography, transference and translation later captured in The Ear and the Other. He began his contribution with Roman Jacobsen's three definition of translation, stated as:
1 intralingual translation, or paraphrase;
2 interlingual translation, or translation in the most common sense;
3 intersemiotic translation, in which, for example verbal signs are reencoded in nonverbal sign systems.
Mahoney went on to query whether it may be more accurate to think of psychoanalysis less as a process of translation, than one of transformation. This shift came into focus due to a concern with undecidability which renders analysis a ‘semiotic of approximations’. More recently, these points of enquiry echoed through a conference in Summer 2019, hosted by the Site and Freud Museum, Translation and Psychoanalysis, convening a varied group to ‘explore the complex links between psychoanalysis and translation across history, culture, politics and psychoanalytic theory and practice’.
Several of the reflections delivered in, and coming from, the conference are represented in the articles of this issue, taking up again the role of psychoanalysis in light of the vicissitudes of translation.
To begin, Anastasios Gaitanidis' paper ‘Ten Theses on the Philosophy of Psychoanalytic Translation’ foregrounds the fragmentary and elusive aspect of psychoanalytic dialogue. Gaitanidis' short passages – taking
inspiration from Walter Benjamin amongst others – cohere as montage drawing attention to representations salvaged from the destruction within psychoanalytic conversation. But also Gaitanidis' writing reminds us of the need to give space in order to listen to suffering and dispossession, without imposing rigid structure or tidying up the inevitable messiness.
Following from the concern for language in exile, Rob Weiss' contribution, ‘Making Strange: Beckett, Laplanche, Translation’, examines some of the moments of self-translation undertaken by Samuel Beckett to think about the ways new constructions/translations can be produced in the analytic space. Weiss pays close attention to the ideas of Jean Laplanche – particularly those that engage with the failures of translation that are, after Freud, linked to primal repression – to argue that a process of making strange is needed to open up pathways to repressed material.
Yael Pilowsky Bankirer's work ‘Lost in Translation’ shares a meditation on the lacuna and promises which arise from the analyst's translation between English and Hebrew. Following from the myth of Babel, the dialectic between the signature of the name and a confusion of tongues is played out between analyst and patient, alongside the analyst and themselves. In addition to Pilowsky Bankirer's paper are her translated poems, drawing out the themes of immigration, interpellation and the materiality of language.
In ‘The Transcription of a Psychoanalytic Session: To Write Beyond the Logos’, we have Manuel Batsch's investigations into the acts of reading and psychoanalysis, drawing attention to the generation of phantasy by written texts, the experience of reading as a process which ‘exceeds the intentional exchange of information’, and the archive of Freud's attempts to illustrate the formations of the unconscious ‘autonomous from, and irreducible to, verbalization’. Amongst the many pleasures of this piece, we were particularly impressed by the often under-discussed interpretative work of Ella Sharpe.
Jacobsen's three definitions of translation are all present in the contributions making up this edition of Sitegeist, with the subject constantly translating and transforming. However, as with much that
pertains to psychoanalysis, they all in turn embrace how challenging meaning making and unmaking can be, beyond the clarity of definition.
In addition to these pieces, also included in issue 15 are several examples and extracts from publications Site members, trainees and associates have published in the last two years. We hope Sitegeist can continue to draw together and share work across the field to allow psychoanalytic thought to circulate.
Finally, we would also like to take this opportunity to thank several members of the Sitegeist Editorial team who are stepping down – Val Parks, Julie Walsh and Barry Watt, without whom this issue and many others would not have been possible. As translation also bears on the debts and history of words, we look forward to continuing our editorial work in their spirit.