Some Thoughts on Freud’s “Translation of the Unconscious” Today
Avi Rybnicki
Éric Laurent writes in his text, “Interpretation: From Truth to Event” that “desire is not the metalinguistic interpretation of a previous instinct drive. Both things are situated on the same level.” So, how is Freud’s translation of the unconscious to be understood from this perspective? Laurent quotes Lacan: “The psychanalysts are part and parcel of the concept of the unconscious, as they constitute that to which the unconscious is addressed.”[1] Here is a first answer: the concept of the unconscious in itself is, in a certain sense, already an interpretation of the other, since the unconscious without the other as such is not tangible. I read Laurent’s following sentences in this context: “The psychoanalyst can only hit the target if he aligns himself with the interpretation performed by the unconscious, already structured like a language” and then continues, “We must add to that the topology of poetics.”[2]
What does this mean? For me (and here we are already, in a way, in the field of poetry because it goes through my body and does not tolerate generalization) this means, among other things, that there is no mechanical, semantic translation, but that the analyst’s neologisms are not a disturbance but a necessity to create the space in which the unconscious can open up. However, these are not arbitrary neologisms; they are closely linked to the text of the analysand’s speech and sound. The analyst allows the inscription in his body, allows the analysand’s speech to resonate in his body.
[1] Laurent, Éric, “Interpretation: From Truth to Event,” Orientation Text for the 2020 Congress of the NLS of the same title, published online here, citing Lacan, Jacques, Écrits. The First Complete Edition in English, tr. B. Fink, Routledge, London, 2006. p. 707.
[2] Ibid.