Psychoanalytic peregrinations. III: Confusion of tongues, psychoanalyst as translator.

Abstract

A variety of problems cause a confusion of tongues between the psychoanalyst and the patient. In this sense the psychoanalyst faces the same problems as the translator of a text from one language to another. Examples are given of confusion due cultural differences, confusion due translation differences among translators, confusion due translator prejudice or ignorance, confusion due ambiguous visual cues and images, and confusion due to an inherently ambiguous text. It is due to this unavoidable confusion that the humanistic sciences cannot in principle achieve the mathematical exactness of the natural sciences and should not be expected to do so or condemned because they do not.