How can this unbreachable gap, that became apparent to me in both my analysis and in my clinical work, ever be translated? Perhaps the legend of the Four Rabbis is articulating something about the different paths in which the inaccessible can be carried into language: four Rabbis – the legend tells – visited the Seventh Heaven to behold the sacred Wheel of Ezekiel. Somewhere in the descent from Paradise to Earth, one Rabbi, having seen such splendour, lost her mind. The second Rabbi could only deal with the uncanniness of what he had experienced by denying it, telling himself that it was nothing but a dream. The third Rabbi became preoccupied with speaking about the details, structure and meaning of the wonder he had seen. He obsessively talked, lectured and explained about it, but the experience of witnessing the miracle could not be captured. The fourth Rabbi, who was a poet, took a pen and paper and sat by the window writing songs about the evening dove, about her daughter sleeping in the cradle, and about the stars in the sky. And she lived her life better than ever before.
As the legend of the Four Rabbis shows, if words are to become alive and find meaning, the gap from the unspeakable should neither be negated nor attempted to be seized. Indeed, in Hebrew the word subject, nosse, also means to carry – in order to become a speaking subject, this unbreachable gap inherent to language should not be attempted to be crossed too quickly but rather, must be carried. Perhaps through the dialectical trans-passing between my own ruins in translation, I learnt that what must be carried is not the ‘truth’ of what we can know of the past, the understanding of the analysand’s story but rather the unknown, the unsettling questions within her untold words. My listening has shifted from the obligation to narrate the past into