The image of the empty vessel is employed here in order to signify that the translator’s labour forges a whole which is empty. The same could be said about the task of the psychoanalyst who reconstructs/glues together our historical vessel/container from an amalgamation of past memory fragments. Yet, reconstructing the past is to construct an empty thing, and yet only then may the emptiness be filled, but not by the psychoanalyst, but from oneself who is yet-to-come. The psychoanalyst reconstructs one’s history out of memories of the past in order to create space for the construction of one’s memories of the future.
VII
[L]anguage is everything, since it is the voice of no one, since it is the very voice of the things, the waves, and the forests …
(Maurice Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 155)
Psychoanalytic translations retain some of the prelapsarian quality of language – they attempt to disclose language as a response to a gesturing, sounding, speaking world, a world where language is nothing more than the name given to the sound of the wind, the uproar of the thunderstorm and the song of the nightingale. They accomplish this
by engaging more with the form than the content of language. They are infused not with intentionality but with free-floating attention which captures the ‘music of what happens’ (Ogden, 1999) at any moment during the therapeutic interaction. The psychoanalyst keeps an ear open for what is not directly said but is implicitly communicated in an intersubjective ‘sonic’ landscape consisting of beats, rhythms, paces, silences, cacophonies and noises that have the potential to interrupt and cause a range of emotions, from amusement to embarrassment to violent ruptures of traumatic anxiety.