translation. And so Freud’s notion that repressed materials are to be reconstructed by the analyst undergoes something of a transformation by Laplanche who suggests that the task of analysis is clear. Firstly an attempt at dismantling the Oedipal constructions; secondly to track the signifiers towards repressed material, i.e. towards that which must be de-translated, and thirdly to promote the production of new constructions, new translations, in which the patient can allow – in the Lacanian sense – ‘a passage to’ repressed material (ibid). Laplanche stresses that these steps originate with the analysand. The analysand translates: she ‘comes to analysis as the bearer of translations that were already carried out throughout her life’, as Dominique Scarfone (1997 [2015]: 56–59) has said, but it is the analyst who detranslates, in a movement between what Andrew Benjamin (1992: 139) has called the ‘deferral and subsequent re-presentation of narrative’. These detranslations are not utilised in an effort to restore the language of the patient to some originary state, but to allow the well-worn and hard to relinquish associations and signifying chains to be undone and allow for a new language to emerge from the patient, new stories that can be produced by her, but ones that may also seem radically other to her: both familiar and strange. This detranslated text is one that addresses the failures of translation, the failures on which primal repression feeds, and is made by the infant as a response to encountering the enigmatic messages of the adult. The ‘failure’in the American translation to see the signifiers of death in Beckett’s comment about graveyards is, perhaps, one way of thinking about this.
