VIII
Psychoanalysis engages in the process of translating what is familiar into something strange in order to disclose that which is already closed, known, or accepted in one’s language. This is because it does not only retain some of the elements of Adamic language but also recognises the effects of the Fall on human language and the collapse of the Tower of Babel – for psychoanalysis, language is not only the ‘house’ of Being but it is also its ‘prison-house’. By making words sound foreign again, psychoanalysis demonstrates that language can imprison, that as a medium of its own, it can fail.
This is nowhere more apparent than in the recent use of psychoanalytic neologisms, native language expressions invented to translate foreign words for the sake of the illusory idea of fidelity to the original, for example, replacing the French ‘après-coup’ with the English ‘afterwardsness’ or the Latin ‘Ego’ and ‘Id’ with the English ‘I’ and ‘It’. The problem with these translations is that they always sound more foreign and more forced than the foreign words themselves. In comparison with the latter, they take on a deceitful quality, a claim to a correspondence between word and the original object/process. The original foreign words are closer to the aims of psychoanalysis as they confront the English words that try to pass themselves off as faithful to the original German ones with their mediation, their moment of being subjectively and historically constructed.
This powerful psychoanalytic perspective of intentional estrangement can also be found in the work of modernist writers such as Joyce and Beckett. As their linguistic heritage was colonised by the British, they wrote first in French and then translated their texts into English, resisting through this double estrangement the effects of British colonisation by choosing to write first in a language that the British could not colonise. However, when they translated their texts into English, this was not an attempt to claim back their language, but to exhibit how language itself