Psychoanalysis and Translation: Towards a Comparative History

Join us for this fascinating seminar with Andreas Mayer.

The advent of psychoanalysis has led to profound transformations in the understanding of subjectivity in the Western world and beyond. These changes have often been attributed to the fact that, from the 1940s onwards, post-Freudian theories and therapies have been integrated into a dominant discourse produced essentially in the US, penetrating much of Western culture. While it seems evident that the unilateral diffusionist model of reception that has prevailed for almost a century is flawed in many respects and must be abandoned, it is less clear what alternative models could give us a better account of the multiple processes of translation and reception occurring on a global scale. In my presentation I will argue that we need a comparative approach grounded in historical, philological and sociological studies of editions and translations that can also address epistemological questions crucial to the practice of psychoanalysis.