VI
Internal and external destructive energies often attempt to annihilate one’s psychic objects which therefore demand to be preserved by psychoanalytic translation. When the past contains mostly death and destruction and the present produces instant heirlooms, psychoanalysts are invited to become custodians of one’s psychic objects by performing the task of the translator.
For psychoanalysts as translators, the amount of meaning is in exact proportion to the presence of destruction of one’s psychic objects. This is what makes it possible to find meaning in the objects of one’s past that are reduced into ruins and fragments which, if not for the agency of psychoanalyst’s translation, would be perverted and crushed by the weight of so much levelling.
Something like this is described more explicitly in Walter Benjamin’s (1923) essay ‘The Task of the Translator’, whose aim is to collect:
Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way, a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original’s mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognisable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are a part of a vessel (p. 260).