Translation/Transformation

100 Years of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis

Dana Birksted-Breen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000326185
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Translation is at the heart of psychoanalysis: from unconscious to conscious, experience to verbal expression, internal to enacted, dream thought to dream image, language to interpretation, unrepresented to represented and transference of past to present.

The book's first part discusses the question of translation, literal and metaphoric. Both linguistic and cultural translations are closely tied to specific and significant personalities who were involved in the early history of psychoanalysis and thus in the development of the IJP. There was a close relationship between the IJP and the visual arts via the Bloomsbury Group. The link between the visual arts and the IJP is indeed to be found in its logo, which is taken from a painting by Ingres. The second part of the book approaches transformations between psychoanalysis and the arts from conscious, unconscious and non-represented elements into non-verbal modes, specifically visual, poetic and musical; it also looks at the developments and transformations in psychoanalytic ideas about artistic expression as expressed within the pages of the IJP.

This book will be of great interest to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, and to those interested in the history of psychoanalysis and the IJP.

Part One

A promenade through history and the central place of translation

1

Translation as a metaphor, the role of archaeology in Freud’s deciphering of the human mind

Heinz Weiss and Carina Weiss

Freud, the “archaeologist”

In a letter to his early biographer, Stefan Zweig, Freud admits that he has

sacrificed a great deal for my collection of Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities, have actually read more archaeology than psychology, and that before the war and once after its end I felt compelled to spend every year at least several days or weeks in Rome.

(Freud 1931, p. 402)¹

Very probably, Freud started collecting art objects in a systematic way after his father’s death in October 1986 (Forrester 1994, pp. 227, 230–234).² He began with copies of Renaissance works, but switched soon over to original antiquities from the Egyptian, Greek, and Roman periods, later also to Asiatic art objects. Many items he bought himself, and many he got as presents from friends, disciples, followers, and also from patients.³

In fact, towards the very end of his life, his collection of antiquities had amounted to more than 3,000 pieces, some of which have subsequently been published in various archaeological journals and volumes (Engelmann 1976; Weiss & Weiss 1984, 1985; Gamwell & Wells 1989; Corcoran 1991; D’Agata 1994; Forrester 1994; Reeves & Uemo 1996; Marinelli 1998; Śliwa 1999; C. Weiss 2011).⁴

When the authors of this article had the opportunity to visit Freud’s house, 20 Maresfield Gardens, London, immediately after the death of his daughter Anna in spring 1983, it conveyed the impression of an antique tomb, with its treasures still unchanged even after a long period of time (Figure 1.1, Figure 1.2, Figure 1.3). This was the first time that parts of his collection were subject to scientific research and subsequent publication (Weiss & Weiss 1985).

Figure 1.1 20 Maresfield Gardens, the house, May 1983, copyright Carina and Heinz Weiss.

If we trace back Freud’s interest in archaeology to his personal life, we may detect its origins to his childhood (cf. Cassirer Bernfeld 1951), when the ruins of an old castle nearby his hometown Freiberg (Moravia) evoked his spirit of discovery and perhaps initiated his identification with famous discoverers like Heinrich Schliemann who had excavated the ruins of Troy in the 1870s; Sir Arthur Evans, excavator of the temples of Karnak; or Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion, who had succeeded to decipher the enigmatic hieroglyphs on the Rosetta Stone from Egypt by comparing them to the demotic and ancient Greek versions of the text on the Hellenistic stele displayed since 1802 in the British Museum.⁵

Figure 1.2 20 Maresfield Gardens, Freud’s study, May 1983, copyright Carina and Heinz Weiss.

Repeatedly Freud mentions his fascination of archaeology and in particular his longing to visit the antique sites in Italy (Pompeii, Rome) in his letters to Wilhelm Fließ.⁶ There is some evidence that Freud’s interest in W. Jensen’s (1903) novel Gradiva (Freud 1907) was motivated by an hidden identification with the protagonist, young archaeologist Norbert Hanold, who had travelled to Pompeii to meet the reappearance of a girl he had loved in his childhood, as it was for Freud his early girlfriend Gisela Fluß. The descriptions he gives in his autobiographical fragment on “Screen Memories” (Freud 1899; Bernfeld 1946) reveal some striking parallels to the imagery of Jensen’s novel (Weiss & Weiss 1989; C. Weiss 2018).

Another important link to archaeology was Freud’s relationship with his friend from school days, Emanuel Loewy, one of the few persons outside his family with who he was on first-name terms. Since 1891, Loewy held a professorship of classical archaeology at the University of Rome. He used to visit Freud once a year and is likely to have further stimulated and sustained his interest in archaeology. From 1896 onwards, Freud began to acquire antiquities and copies which are mentioned in his letters to Fließ.⁷

Figure 1.3 20 Maresfield Gardens, a glass cabinet with Egyptian, Etruscan, and other antiquities in the study, May 1983, copyright Carina and Heinz Weiss.

Amongst Freud’s many art dealers were Ludwig Pollak in Rome and Robert Lustig in Vienna. In a letter to the authors, Lustig remembers Freud as an expert and keen collector of Egyptian, Greek, Etruscan, and Roman antiquities. He visited him regularly to introduce new items and sometimes even exchanged objects with him, like the side piece of a Roman sarcophagus which was placed on the top of one of his bookshelves (Figures 1.4 and 1.5).

Figure 1.4 20 Maresfield Gardens, fragment of a Roman sarcophagus on top of a bookshelf, May 1983, copyright Carina and Heinz Weiss.

These objects, together with his journeys to Italy and Greece, deepened his interest in ancient culture and accompanied his scientific work from its very beginning up to his last paper on Moses and monotheism (Freud 1939). The antiquities were objects of devotion, charms to keep away the roughness of everyday life, sometimes used to explain his theory (Doolittle 1956). Acquiring and giving away, the collection stayed in perpetual movement during Freud’s lifetime. Antiques were gifted to his closest disciples like the gemstones which adorned the rings of the members of the “Secret Committee” or were given to family members and friends. Sometimes they were exchanged with art dealers to acquire better or more desired items (Berthelsen 1987, pp. 47–48; Forrester 1994, pp. 229–230; C. Weiss 2011, 2016).

Figure 1.5 Front page of a letter March 10, 1986, by Robert Lustig to Dr. Carina Weiss, copyright Carina and Heinz Weiss.

(Re)construction, decipherment, and translation

Freud’s comparison of the work of the archaeologist to that of the psychoanalyst seems all present in his work. He also published a number of papers on antique history and mythology (Freud 1910b, 1911b, 1916–1917a, 1932, 1939, 1940). The aim is always to uncover the foundations underneath the surface, to decipher a meaning, and to examine its various transformations. Already in his Studies on Hysteria (Freud 1895), he draws the parallel between the symptoms of a hysteric patient and a “pictographic script which has become intelligible after the discovery of a few bilingual inscriptions” (p. 129).

One year later, in 1896, he extends this comparison when he writes:

Imagine that an explorer arrives in a little-known region where his interest is aroused by an expanse of walls, fragments of columns, and tablets with half-effaced and unreadable inscriptions. He may content himself with inspecting what lies exposed to his view, with questioning the inhabitants (…) who live in the vicinity, about what tradition tells them of the history and meaning of these archaeological remains, and with noting down what they tell him - and he may then proceed on his journey. But he may act differently. He may have brought picks, shovels and spades with him, and he may set the inhabitants to work with these implements. Together with them he may start upon the ruins, clear away the rubbish, and, beginning from the visible remains, uncover what is buried. If his work is crowned with success, the discoveries are self-explanatory: the ruined walls are part of the ramparts of a palace or a treasure-house; the fragment of columns can be filled out into a temple: the numerous inscriptions, which, by good chance, may be bilingual, reveal an alphabet and a language, and, when they have been deciphered and translated, yield undreamed-of information about the events of the remote past, to commemorate with the monuments were built. Saxa loquuntur!

(Freud 1896, p. 191)

By quoting the motto of stone gravers, palaeontologists, and geologists saxa loquuntur – the rocks begin to speak⁸ – Freud refers to a model of decipherment, where the meaning of a text can be discovered by means of reconstruction and translation. Every trace, every transcription contains the testimony of its origin, even if parts of it were lost and had to be supplemented by meaningful construction.

Freud discovered the “bilinguals” he was looking for in the language of dreams, and later on in the manifestations of the transference. Both could be seen as transcripts by which the enigmatic language of symptoms became gradually understandable as a meaningful narrative.

Although Freud altered and extended his metapsychological assumptions in subsequent decades, his basic model of the analytic work as an act of decipherment and translation remained relatively unchanged. Thus, in accordance with his argument from 1896, he wrote some 40 years later in “Constructions in Analysis”:

His [the analyst’s] work of construction, or, if it is preferred, of reconstruction, resembles to a great extent an archaeologist’s excavation of some dwelling-place that has been destroyed and buried or of some ancient edifice. The two processes are in fact identical, except that the analyst works under better conditions and has more material at his command to assist him, since what he is dealing with is not something destroyed but something that is still alive - and perhaps for another reason as well. But just like the archaeologist builds up the walls of a building from the foundations that have remained standing, determines the number and positions of columns from depressions in the floor and reconstructs the mural decorations and paintings from the remains found in the debris, so does the analyst proceed when he draws his inferences from the fragments of memories, from the associations and from the behaviour of the subject of the analysis. Both of them have an undisputed right to reconstruct by means of supplementing and combining the surviving remains. Both of them, moreover, are subject of many of the same difficulties and sources of error. One of the most ticklish problems that confronts the archaeologist is notoriously the relative age of his finds; and if an object makes its appearance in one particular level, it often remains to be decided whether it belongs to this particular level or whether it was carried down to that level owing to some subsequent disturbance. It is easy to imagine the corresponding doubts that arise in the case of analytic constructions.

(Freud 1937, p. 259)

As we will see, the latter problem is not just a methodological one, but closely connected to Freud’s conceptions of “bi-temporality” (“Zweizeitigkeit”) and “afterwardness” (“Nachträglichkeit”). But when he published his paper on “Constructions”, this was in itself a time of critical personal change, the year before he was forced to emigrate and to move to London. It was Marie Bonaparte who helped him to escape the Nazi terror and who also succeeded to arrange for the greatest part of his collection to follow him to his London exile. Single pieces of his collection were personal gifts from her.

When Freud speaks in the aforementioned quotation of the “mural decorations and paintings” as the aim of the archaeologist’s reconstructions, he seems to allude to his fascination for antique Pompeii. From 1900 onwards, he had acquired...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One A promenade through history and the central place of translation
• Part Two Form and representation
• Index