Translation

TRANSLATION

There are a large number of occurrences of the verb übersetzen ("to translate") and the nounÜbersetzung ("translation") in Freud's work, indicative of his interest in translation, although the terms had no specific conceptual value for him within the field of psychoanalysis. However, non-German readers should bear in mind the proximity in German ofÜbersetzung and Übertragung ("transference"). What psychoanalysts refer to as "transference" is, in German, also a translation, a carrying over.

Freud's interest in translation was manifest early in his career: while doing his military service he translated an essay by John Stuart Mill and, on his return from his stay at the Salpêtrière, impressed by Charcot's clinical method, he translated two of the Charcot's main works, as well as two works by Bernheim, which he felt were essential for a scientific understanding of hysteria and the use of therapeutic methods in hypnosis. For Freud the experience of translation was contemporary with his discovery of psychoanalysis as a therapeutic practice. Ernest Jones emphasized Freud's gifts as a translator (Pollak Cornillot, 1990). It should come as no surprise, therefore, to find that translation infiltrated his thought as a metaphor for a large number of psychic processes.

In his earliest writings and with the appearance of the concept of repression, translation, in its primary sense of "to bring over," became a way of picturing the transformation of those psychic contents reaching consciousness, repression being thus defined (Freud to Fliess, December 6, 1896) as a "defect of translation," an absence of conscious expression. The work of dream interpretation likewise resembles a translation of the language of the unconscious into the language of consciousness, of the remembered dream content into its hidden sense: "Interpreting a dream consists in translating the manifest content of the dream into the latent dream-thoughts, in undoing the distortion which the dream-thoughts have had to submit to from the censorship of the resistance" (1907a, p. 59). But at the same time Freud cautioned against the tendency to overestimate the importance of symbols and reduce the work of dream translation to the mere decoding of symbols, and to ignore the ideas that present themselves to the mind of the dreamer during analysis. Finding the hidden meaning was more complex than the simple transliteration of the signs of the unconscious system into the signs of the conscious one. Elsewhere (1918b [1914]), Freud uses the term translation more generically, to designate the psychoanalyst's interpretation of a psychic phenomenon: for example, the fear of being eaten by the wolf "is translated" into the fear of being raped by the father. More recently André Green (1997/2000) has rediscovered the richness of the "hypothesis of translation" present throughout Freud's work.

MichÈle Pollak Cornillot

See also: Biblioteca Nueva de Madrid (Freud, S., Obras completas ); France; Interpretation; Opere (writings of Sigmund Freud); Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud ; Symbol.

Bibliography

Freud, Sigmund. (1907a). Delusions and dreams in Jensen's "Gradiva." SE, 9: 1-95.

——. (1918b [1914]). From the history of an infantile neurosis. SE, 17: 1-122.

Green, André. (2000). The chains of eros: The sexual in psychoanalysis (Luke Thurston, Trans.). London: Rebus. (Original work published 1997)

Mahony, Patrick. (1980). Toward the understanding of translation in psychoanalysis. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 28, 461-473.

Mijolla, Alain de. (1991). L'édition en français des "Œuvres" de Freud avant 1940. Autour de quelques documents nouveaux. Revue internationale d 'histoire de la psychanalyse, 4, 209-270.

Pollak Cornillot, Michèle. (1990). Freud traducteur. Introductionà la traduction des œuvres de Freud. Doctoral dissertation, Université René-Descartes, Paris.

Further Reading

Amati-Mehler, Jacqueline, et al. (1993). The babel of the unconscious. Mother tongue and foreign languages in the psychoanalytic dimension. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.