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The Translational Metaphor in Psychoanalysis Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96:65–81 doi: 10.1111/1745-8315.12241 The translational metaphor in psychoanalysis Lewis Kirshner 3517 Duck Pond Road, Waterford VT 05819, USA – [email protected] A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: http://youtu.be/gpgB9BuChPw (Accepted for publication 1 May 2014) The translational metaphor in psychoanalysis refers to the traditional method of interpreting or restating the meaning of verbal and behavioral acts of a patient in other, presumably more accurate terms that specify the forces and conflicts underlying symptoms. The analyst translates the clinical phenome- nology to explain its true meaning and origin. This model of analytic process has been challenged from different vantage points by authors presenting alter- native conceptions of therapeutic action. Although the temptation to find and make interpretations of clinical material is difficult to resist, behaving in this way places the analyst in the position of a teacher or diagnostician, seeking a specific etiology, which has not proven fruitful. Despite its historical appeal, I argue that the translational model is a misleading and anachronistic version of what actually occurs in psychoanalysis. I emphasize instead the capacity of analysis to promote the emergence of new forms of representation, or figura- tion, from the unconscious, using the work of Lacan, Laplanche, and Modell to exemplify this reformulation, and provide clinical illustrations of how it looks in practice. Keywords: translation, interpretation, figuration, symbolization, speech, signifier The theme of translation has a long history in psychoanalysis. It retains sig- nificance as a term that represents three related ideas: a language change, a movement across a psychic boundary, and the transference of an object relationship. Freud’s terms Ubertragung€ [transference, transmission] and Ubersetzung€ [translation] carry all of these connotations, for they both mean bringing something across, or carrying something over. The etymology of the related word ‘metaphor’ derives from a literal Greek version of the Latin of transference (both meaning ‘carrying beyond or across’). Similarly, we can include the related term ‘interpretation,’ which certainly describes a transfer of meaning or a translation of one set of terms into another. Again the Greek word metaphrase unites these two meanings, and a metaphrastis is a translator. In a similar vein, the Yiddish expression fartaysthn means to translate and to explain (Bloom, 2008). For a long time, this condensation of three concepts served as a kind of paradigm for psychoanalysis, both in terms of its attention to different levels Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis 66 L Kirshner of mental registration, as Freud noted,1 and for the clinical phenomenon of transference itself, which became the royal road to the unconscious to be cleared by the timely translation of its meanings. The elaboration of new meanings via the expression of hitherto un-, or incompletely, translated experiences can occur in many forms. The linguist Roman Jakobson (1959) proposed three types of translation: interlinguistic (between two languages); intralinguistic (different terms within the same language) and ‘intersemiotic translation,’ from one system of signs (symptoms and bodily states) to another (of linguistic meanings). All three have their place in clinical psycho- analysis, but special importance seems to be accorded to the intersemiotic by most analytic authors. Raw feelings, unconscious fantasies, and unverbalized experiences need to be put into words, perhaps for the first time, to enable mastery and growth and to interrupt blind repetition. The Freudian uncon- scious represents, above all, a repository of pre-linguistic, implicit experiences that emerge as figurations of varying kinds in language, play, and action – a perspective developed by the philosopher Giorgio Agemben (1978) in his Infancy and History. Infancy, for Agemben, provides a reservoir of founda- tional memory traces of crucial interactions and their accompanying sensa- tions on which development is based. It seems hard not to regard the process of psychoanalytic interpretation as a form of intralinguistic translation of a patient’s narrative as it unfolds in the process of association, linking the signifiers of discourse to the remembered past and the history of the subject In the classic model, what is being said or enacted represents above all a disguised meaning and refers to the unknown of the subject’s unconscious. In Eluard’s memorable phrase, ‘There is another world, but it is in this one’ – an inner world to be revealed by interpretation. Although, as Freud (1923) warned, analysts must beware of embracing the prophetic role that interpretation inevitably suggests, expe- rienced clinicians do possess knowledge about mental troubles and can scar- cely be expected to withhold their judgments behind an analytic mirror. Patients seek to know the meanings of their feelings and experiences and, however cautiously, analysts continue to apply theories that offer a logic of explanation for them. In this sense, as Hochman (2001) has observed, the countertransference precedes the transference, as the analyst comes prepared to hear certain things from patients, even if those things reside mainly on a level of clinical inference, rather than of metapsychology. It is a common- place of clinical practice, for instance, to link a recurrent behavior to a set of past events, especially ones from the patient’s developmental and family history, and often such a move opens previously unspoken areas of associa- tion. Yet despite the perennial and, one might say, inevitable appeal of this conventional (psychotherapeutic) model, a convergence of several factors 1“As you know, I am working on the assumption that our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accord with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription. ... I should like to emphasize the fact that the successive registrations represent the psychic achievement of successive epochs of life. At the boundary between two such epochs a translation of the psychic material must take place” (Freud, letter to Fleiss, 12 December 1896; Masson, 1985). Int J Psychoanal (2015) 96 Copyright © 2014 Institute of Psychoanalysis The translational metaphor in psychoanalysis 67 has thrown increasing doubt on the accuracy and effectiveness of interpreta- tion as the engine of therapeutic action in psychoanalysis. Since the 1940s, at least, the project of developing a reliable psychoana- lytic method of translation of unconscious meanings has been undermined by the clash of incompatible theoretical approaches, as well as by failures to achieve consensus in clinical practice. The different vocabularies and assumptions of Kleinian, Freudian, and Relational analysts, to cite only those examples, make dialogue, let alone anything approaching agreement about interpretation of psychic content, almost impossible. With this expan- sion of models, the earlier expectation that a trained analyst, operating as a knowledgeable expert, could discover the correct interpretation of a neurosis has not been realized. Had it been successful, the history of psychoanalysis would look much different today. From our current vantage point, how- ever, it is extremely doubtful that any one theory is likely to displace the others. If this is the case, psychoanalysis must reassess its paradigm of inter- pretation as its privileged mode of therapeutic action. In addition to the divergence of schools, three other factors have undermined the translational model of analytic practice: the debate between proponents of narrative–hermeneutic explanations and those arguing for uncovering accurate historical truth; the postmodern attention by linguistic philosophers to the shifting and imprecise nature of language itself; and the relational, intersubjective emphasis on countertransference and co- construction. The increasing use of terms like symbolization, mentalization, and figuration suggests an ongoing paradigm shift away from the model of an applied science of discerning and interpreting unconscious meaning to methods of promoting new products of mental activity. From this perspec- tive, rather than deciphering or translating a disguised text, the analyst participates in a process that creates a text. ‘Traduttore, traditore,’ goes the familiar Italian expression – to translate is to betray. At its most obvious level, crossing interlinguistically from one tongue to another always carries a loss. Connotations, historical references, and puns cannot be equivalently conveyed in the best of translations. At a yet more profound level, Ferenczi (1933) reminded us of a confusion of ton- gues related to the differences in meaning across the divides of power and sexuality. The language of those in authority, he suggested, can become a kind of Orwellian double speak, disguising covert motives and interests. Even beyond Ferenczi’s enduring insight into the psychology of the trauma- tized, contemporary thought confronts the broader philosophical question of postmodernism: how can we pretend to know or understand the sense of another subject’s discourse without imposing our own version of truth? Foucault (1979), for example, taught us to look for the marks of a hidden biopolitics that defines or imposes a framework of meanings we are con- strained
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