Our event is dedicated to exploring multilingualism not merely as a linguistic phenomenon, but as a fundamental framework of clinical and cultural space, where every additional language dimension complicates and enriches the field of psychoanalytic experience.We propose an encounter with all the returning diversity of languages, where the impossible alignment of meanings allows Speech, slips of the tongue, the living word, and the materiality of the voice to bind, complicate, and sustain the dynamics of the subject’s existence.
Psychoanalysis is a polyphonic movement historically shaped by the contributions of various cultures and linguistic traditions. It has never been a realm of absolute linguistic transparency or idyllic understanding. Acknowledging the polyphony of the unconscious and the diversity of languages means a willingness to face the gap, the irreducible uniqueness and “out-of-placeness” of the subject, the difficulties of translation, and an encounter with the untranslatable remainder.
Through a series of presentations, we invite our colleagues from France, Greece, Portugal, and Ukraine to outline the historical trajectories, conceptual shifts, and the contemporary state of the psychoanalytic movement within their linguistic communities.
Format and Core Focus:
• Language Community Presentations: The origin, history, development, key conceptual shifts, and current climate of psychoanalysis in our native languages.
• The Function of Speech and the Field of the Untranslatable: Difficulties of translation as a condition for the development of psychoanalysis. The language of the unconscious: symptom, metaphor, metonymy. How the unconscious manifests in linguistic paradoxes, shifts of meaning, symptoms, and the specificities of both everyday clinical practice and theoretical inquiry within each linguistic tradition. We invite participants to explore the “productive” distortions of the foundational languages of psychoanalysis.
• Clinical and Theoretical Landscapes: We invite participants to define the unique coordinates in which the psychoanalytic thought and clinical practice of your linguistic space were born and continue to evolve—the linguistic and conceptual coordinates through which you listen to speech in your country.
The presentation series will conclude with an international round-table discussion featuring speakers from all participating language traditions.…
