If psychoanalysis is the talking cure, as Anna O. dubbed it, the subject of this discourse speaks in foreign tongues. In a literal sense, Anna lost her ability to speak in German, piecing sentences together in English, French, and Italian. Breuer’s translation, then, consisted not only in making meaning of hysterical speech, but of translating linguistic aphasias and their accompanying symptoms into a narrative. Ten years later, Freud reimagined the role of translation in the case study on Dora: "The analyst must translate [the transference] for the patient." The proposed seminar explores the varied relations between the two concepts in psychoanalytic theory and practice. Freud had recourse to the metaphor of translation not only in describing the practice of the analyst, but also in his theorization of the psyche. Given the epistemic challenge that emerges with the discovery of the unconscious, psychoanalytic knowledge is constitutively in translation. Metapsychology then, is a theory of psychic translations, which, simultaneously, attempts to translate into language that which escapes symbolization. While in Freud, 'translation' does the work of a metaphor lending para-conceptual support to a variety of concepts, Laplanche develops the term into a concept proper. For him, the translator is not the analyst, but the child, who is exposed to the enigmatic signifier of the parents' sexuality, calling for a translation that will always fail. Such a concept of an originary translation was also taken up by Gayatri Spivak, who develops it from Melanie Klein's theorization of infantile symbol-formation. 

Translation, however, is not only a metaphor and concept. The history of psychoanalysis as an international movement is inextricable from the history of its translations and, indeed, the transferential dynamics that govern translation, particularly in the case of Strachey whom Freud analyzed. Often, translations had their own vicissitudes, as in Strachey's ego for Freud's Ich, the French désir for Wunsch, or the much-contested instinct forTrieb. Whether translations are misleading or serendipitous, psychoanalytic theory and practice traverse many languages that continue to evolve. Our seminar explores the convergence of these multiple understandings of translation and transference, from intrapsychic translations, the analyst’s translations of symptoms, and the child’s translation of enigmatic messages to the afterlives of psychoanalytic concepts as they enter different languages and their respective lingual memories.

We invite contributors to explore a wide variety of psychoanalytic translations, including the problem of psychoanalysis’s social, historical, and cultural determination as a European practice; metapsychology as translation; psychoanalytic concepts in translation, especially into languages not covered in Laplanche and Pontalis; transference as translation; and the translation of psychoanalysis as a practice into non-Anglo-European contexts.