11 - Interpretation of psychoanalysis and psychoanalysis of interpretation
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"Torn between the necessity to interject
glosses on multiple meanings of the text..." 1.
Psychoanalysis has the peculiarity of being considered,
according to different points of view, a science born in a humanistic field
or a humanistic discipline conceived in a scientific context. A fate non
very different from that often dealt to the science of translation, even
because hermeneutics, from the Greek hermeneuien, to interpret, "the science of interpretation"2,
is sometimes considered an opponent to science:
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A modern debate, with terminological confusion of its own, rages as to
whether Freud, despite his intentions, developed a clinical theory that
was hermeneutic rather than scientific3 |
Freud, although educated as a physician, had a wide humanistic
culture that induced him to express many concepts with a figurative and
evocative language, that gives an idea of modesty and tentativeness, of
being concrete or temporary but never absolute. As to that, as Mahony also
emphasizes, the Vienna physician would have agreed with the fundamental
methodological tenet of modern science, enunciated by Popper, that
"Every scientific tenet must remain tentative forever"4.
As we have seen in previous units, according to Whorf, the
mother tongue structure has an important influence on the individual's
way of viewing the world and life. Without going overboard, we can state
that the language used, although it does not completely exclude the
expression of some concepts, can't help but favor some expressive modes.
In Mahony's opinion, Freud's breeding in a German-speaking environment
positively influenced the development of psychoanalytical theory,
fostering its peculiar expression, shunning sterile scientific style5.
The translator of the official English version of Freud's
works, James Strachey, seems to have overlapped to Freudian view and its
expression an ideology more typical of the British psychoanalysis of Jones,
tending to 'science-ize' the metaphorical and evocative form of Freudian
concepts.
One of the first examples Mahony shows us is the translation of
the title Neue Folge der Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse,
translated by Strachey as New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis,
while, more literally, it could be rendered as "new series of lectures
toward introducing psychoanalysis". As you can see, Freud's style is more
flexible, offering us varied possibilities, is less absolute, more
"tentative" as Popper says.
Another example, a well-known quotation from Freud that was the
calling card of the whole Lacanian movement, is the sentence:
Wo Es war, soll Ich werden
which Strachey translated in this way:
Where id was, ego shall be.
One of the fundamental features of this sentence is its
dynamic sense, its view implying a gradual evolution of the individual,
sense conveyed by the verb werden that can be translated as "become". The
sentence then takes on a rather different sense:
Where id was, ego shall become.
The individual's evolution is a gradual transformation
of one's unconscious material into conscious material, or, in other words,
man is progressively less and less driven by unconscious drives, desires,
mas-tering them more and more consciously. Effectively Strachey's version
does not convey the idea of gradualism implied in Freudian utterance.
Another rather striking case of ideological deformation regards
libido, which in German is characterized by Klebrigkeit, translated by
Strachey as adhesiveness, while the German word suggests a strong idea of
"stickiness" rather than "adhesiveness". Individuals striving to transfer
libidinal investment toward the therapist have, in Freud's view, a sticky
libido, which gives a much more precise idea of the negative connotation
of such condition.
The most paradoxical aspect of such constant interpretive
deformation of the Freudian text by the British translator consists in the
fact that it is exerted precisely on a discipline that can be rightfully
enclosed among the hermeneutical sciences. The great intuition that stands
at the basis of talk-based psychotherapy is the fact that the translation
of mental material into verbal material is not a series of equivalences but,
as in all translation processes, adds and simultaneously removes something
from the original. The analyst's work is often concentrated precisely on
the 'translation loss' of such expressive work of the patient.
Or, in the case of the interpretation of dreams - that will be
analyzed in the next unit - psychoanalyst must do an actual translation
from dream material into words. The process by which the therapist gets to
know the patient is comparable to the therapist's learning of a code. If
all the dreams of all dreamers 'spoke' the same language maybe a
dictionary or a handbook for dream interpretation would be enough to
decode them. But every individual has his own idiomorphic way of dreaming -
and to unconsciously codify - and the therapist must be able to understand
such code in order to be able to translate it.
The translator runs the constant risk of working like Strachey
did - we are not interested at the moment in deciding how much of his
interpretation was induced by conscious ideology and how much by
unconscious deformation - manipulating the text according to her views,
when different from the author's.
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If ... the translator is not fully aware of the important yet sometimes
subtle differences - professional, political, and social - between his
views and those of the person translated, various ideological distortions
are bound to creep into the secondary text. The more complex the source text
is, the more the translator should be self-aware of his own different
positions and their contaminatory potential6. |
This consideration, in our view valid for any translator,
holds for any reader too because, as we have seen, reading itself is a
translation process. Going back to the scientific/hermeneutic diatribe,
and taking a view of translation studies as a science, maybe the best way
to construct a scientific foundation to such undoubtedly hermeneutical
discipline consists in seeking to give a scientific base to the art of
interpretation, preventing the unconscious to play tricks on the
interpreter.
Eventually we will return to the methodological similarities
between translator and psychoanalyst later in the course. Now we have the
pleasure to close this unit with a last quotation taken from Mahony's
profound essay, intertwining the motives behind translation, betrayal,
and psychoanalysis with poetic irony:
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The siren call of the inexhaustible unconscious lures every psychoanalyst,
monolingual or not, into being both translator and traitor7. |
Bibliographical references
CALVINO I. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, translated by William Weaver, London, Vintage, 1998, ISBN 0-7493-9923-6.
MAHONY P. Hermeneutics and ideology: on translating Freud, in Meta. Journal des traductuers. Translators's Journal.
Montréal, Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1994, vol. 39, n. 2, p. 316-324. ISSN 0026-0452. ISBN 2-7606-2456-0.
POPPER K. The Logic of Scientific Discovery, New York, Harper & Row, 1965.
WEBSTER'S NEW WORLD DICTIONARY ed. by D. B. Guralnik. Cleveland (Ohio), Collins, 1979. ISBN 0-529-05324-1.
1 Calvino 1979, p. 68.
2 Webster's, p. 656.
3 Mahony 1994, p. 319.
4 Popper, 1965, p. 280.
5 Mahony 1994, p. 317.
6 Mahony, 1994, p. 321-322.
7 Mahony 1994, p. 322.
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