Idiom: The Translations of Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This essay aims to tackle the problem of the untranslatables within psychoanalysis by reviewing some aspects of the radical consubstantiality between the problem of translation and the psychoanalytic problem itself. The first part of this essay alludes to the trajectories and tendencies psychoanalytic theories have taken through the journey of its translations, necessary exiles and transfers that speak not only to the discourse of psychoanalysis as an untranslatable in itself, but more poignantly, as a discourse whose flight from normativity, more clearly seen with its exile with the rise of fascism, has shaped and structured the discourse we have today. The historical metamorphosis psychoanalysis suffered with its generative stumbles and slips will serve thus as a metaphor of its (un)translatability, both as a praxis and as theory. The translations, versions, diversions and transfers in its “fleeing forward” from fascism will lead to the notion of “navels of untranslatability”, a notion elaborated by Nestor Braunstein throughout his body of work but more formally in his book, Traducir el psicoanálisis: interpretacion, sentido y transferencia. In this yet to be translated work, Braunstein lays out the nuanced problem of the translation and re-translations (in a sense also akin to the translation/rotation/transfer of the Earth) as an essential topic that pertains both to the shape and ethos of the analytical discourse as well as to the matter, the stuff, psychoanalysis tries to grasp: psychic content, which in itself is the result of an always more or less failed, endeavor of translation. The second part of this essay explores Freud’s schematic description of the psyche as a translation/translating device while keeping close to Braunstein’s supplemental elaborations to the Freudian scheme as we consider Néstor Braunstein, to whom this work is dedicated and from whom we borrow so many words, to be, without a doubt, the great translator of the Freudian and Lacanian discourse in the ultimate sense of the word. This is, the sense of transmission and re-elaboration as the exercise par excellance of translation. Braunstein’s elaborations are thus followed in an exploration that departs from the linguistic nature of the unconscious as a first translation that always fails to arrive, and lands on the Lacanian instance of jouissance: discourse as the very texture of (un)translatability “tamed” by the Lacanian style of equivocation, equivocity and fruitful error…the game of words and phonetic play, the style with which the complex relationship between the subject and his master, the unconscious, is joyously (in its interplay with jouissance)displayed.

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