Intercultural communication: the case of psychoanalysis

Abstract

[Abstract] It is customary to separate Freud’s early scientific years from his later psychoanalytic work. Considering, however, his territorializing efforts and certain discontinuous, aterritorial elements that resist and unsettle these efforts, we perceive a both hierarchically assertive and centrifugal writer from the beginning. In the intercultural and interlinguistic spaces of Freud’s later psychoanalytic texts, holes of considerable depth and multivalence appear. Boundaries turn fluid there; associations spin off in seemingly senseless directions. At the same time, there is an involvement in the realities of the moment, a penchant for interlinguistic elaborations and deviations that draws on various European literatures and languages. Freud’s psychoanalytic thought begins to take form in Paris in his footnotes for his 1885/86 translation of Jean-Martin Charcot’s lectures at the Salpêtrière. Translational movements then permeate Freud’s psychoanalytic work, such as The Interpretation of Dreams. In its ceaseless movement, Freud’s writing affirms its singular space before and beyond particular delineations. It is the space of an imagination that draws on linguistico-cultural difference and transforms various European languages into a stream that in its force still leaves an obscurely resistant remainder— «scattered cells» (Freud 1962: 229)—intact: therefrom emanates an incessantly productive disturbance.