Introduction
This cycle is designed to study the influence of languages and cultures on the formation of psychoanalytic theories and practices. From the outset, psychoanalysis has been transcultural or multicultural. Language, the material on which psychoanalysis works, is also a vehicle for theoretical and clinical particularities. The English and Spanish languages, through the intermediary of their authors but also through the geopolitical particularities in which psychoanalysis has established itself, have contributed to shaping a discipline that from the outset has been part of the globalization movements that history has catalogued. The important effects of globalization, halted by the Great War, were the breeding ground for exchanges and the spread of psychoanalysis. The Second World War and the Nazi persecution of psychoanalysis led to a migration of psychoanalysts themselves. For some, their destiny was the United States of America and Latin America. Freud, as we know, left Vienna to live the last year of his life in London. What can we isolate in Latin American productions from this encounter between psychoanalytic theory and the Spanish language and different Latin cultures? What can we deduce from the immense influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Spanish-speaking countries? Has the introduction of psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan and the dissemination of his work in Latin America influenced the practice and theory of French and European psychoanalysts? Our guest authors will talk to us about their works and practices from this perspective, without excluding the influence of other languages such as Greek, so present in Lacan’s work, Chinese, Japanese and undoubtedly others, in psychoanalytic work and practice.
Lacan makes sui generis use of authors, such as philosophers. For some of them, it’s an original and innovative reading. Can we imagine reading Lacan in the same way that Plato speaks through Socrates in his Menexenus ? Other peoples with the same language? Who are they? With whom do we speak the same language? Lacan assumed the Greeks had knowledge. He considers that the Greeks were closer to God than Christianity in their choice of “supreme being” as the signifier Theo for the biblical god. In this vast area of Lacan’s transference to the Greeks, one question stands out: did he speak the language of the sophists? Why does he leave so many Greek words in the original language and untranslated? It thus announces what “translation studies” today grasp as the richness of translation, which was explored further by Barbara Cassin in the collective work under her direction entitled : European Vocabulary of Philosophies. Dictionary of the Untranslatable (Seuil – Le Robert, 2004).
Texts may be published on the “Psychoanalysis and Cultural Transfers” website, subject to their relevance to the range of concerns that this cycle aims to address.
Diana Kamienny Boczkowski