Recognising these images at a point of encounter between translation and psychoanalysis, I grew aware of my own ruins, and began to understand this particular paradox as an eruptive struggle and (mis) communication inherent to psychoanalysis: Babel can be translated from Hebrew as Bilbul, con-fusion – the name, the word, language itself, is continually and dialectically shifting between the proper name of the highest Tower and the state of utter confusion. Inhabiting the paradox of translation, the analytic work entails a Mobius perpetual movement in which confusion arises from the very attempt to be-with-fusion, to be one, to be understood.
But it was not until I started to work privately in English in my own practice that the actual falling off the Tower of Babel has begun. Therapy as a ‘talking cure’ became haunted by my displaced relation to language. Beginning to work with the complexities of a foreign language, too often I could not recognise the web of meanings associated with words or phrases in the therapy room. I found myself ungrounded; knowing less, imagining more; continually transferring Hebrew to English and English to Hebrew in the enigmatic labyrinth of psychoanalysis, I was somehow less contained by the matrix of language itself. A few months after I opened my private practice in England, I was visited by a recurrent dream in which I meet with T, a patient in my consulting room, and in which, although I am speaking in English, T responds in an unfamiliar language that I can’t understand and that felt to be some sort of Russian. In my work with T, but also in my other encounters in the therapy room – as the dream shows – I felt to be homelessly drifting in between languages. Both in English and – surprisingly – in Hebrew, I was now an immigrant and a foreigner in the most profound way.