To begin, Anastasios Gaitanidis’ paper ‘Ten Theses on the Philosophy of Psychoanalytic Translation’ foregrounds the fragmentary and elusive aspect of psychoanalytic dialogue. Gaitanidis’ short passages – taking inspiration from Walter Benjamin amongst others – cohere as montage drawing attention to representations salvaged from the destruction within psychoanalytic conversation. But also Gaitanidis’ writing reminds us of the need to give space in order to listen to suffering and dispossession, without imposing rigid structure or tidying up the inevitable messiness.
Following from the concern for language in exile, Rob Weiss’ contribution, ‘Making Strange: Beckett, Laplanche, Translation’, examines some of the moments of self-translation undertaken by Samuel Beckett to think about the ways new constructions/translations can be produced in the analytic space. Weiss pays close attention to the ideas of Jean Laplanche – particularly those that engage with the failures of translation that are, after Freud, linked to primal repression – to argue that a process of making strange is needed to open up pathways to repressed material.
Yael Pilowsky Bankirer’s work ‘Lost in Translation’ shares a meditation on the lacuna and promises which arise from the analyst’s translation between English and Hebrew. Following from the myth of Babel, the dialectic between the signature of the name and a confusion of tongues is played out between analyst and patient, alongside the analyst and themselves. In addition to Pilowsky Bankirer’s paper are her translated poems, drawing out the themes of immigration, interpellation and the materiality of language.