In the psychoanalytic legacy of seeking truth and meaning, translation seems to be a halt and a reminder that language springs from its own impossibility for it is precisely what cannot be said that demands words. With the parallel process in my own analysis, I was becoming increasingly aware that my attempts to interpret T’s words were also a way to defend myself against the dryness of our encounters. It was when I could acknowledge my own struggles in translation that I was able to recognise and give room to that of T’s; to witness the dull, uncomfortable sense of the inability to speak, and to suspend the attempts – both T’s and mine – to cover them with words.
Boredom is often a litmus test to the absence of what Amir calls an ‘internal witness’ – the ‘psychic function of the witness’ which enables individuals to bear witness to themselves, ‘to create a frame of reference in which they may experience themselves as being coherently comprehended by others’ (Amir, 2012: 884). But at the same time, she clarifies, it is precisely the therapist’s ability to witness their own negation of thought and the vanishing qualities of the encounter that also initiates the process of transformation. In sessions with T, I became aware of my difficulty to touch the life T was telling me about; to stay with, find meaning or understand many of the things she was saying; to discover the echoes of her words in me.