Journal of the American

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''In the Same Way a Poem Contains the Alphabet'': the Significance of
Translation in William I. Grossman's fReud
Gail S. Reed
J Am Psychoanal Assoc 2009 57: 37
DOI: 10.1177/0003065108329879

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ja Pa

Gail S. Reed 57/1

IN THE SAME WAY A POEM

CONTAINS THE ALPHABET: THE
SIGNIFICANCE OF TRANSLATION
IN WILLIAM I. GROSSMANS FREUD

William I. Grossmans contributions to psychoanalysis have been insufficiently

appreciated, perhaps because his writing is concentrated and his meaning
consequently difficult to unpack. One of his most important contribu
tions is a remarkable description of the systematic way Freud imagined,
thought, and theorized, beginning long before he created psychoanalysis.
This way of thinking exemplifies Freuds theories even as it organizes his
thinking. It is flexible, expandable, hierarchical, and recursive. Grossmans
reading provides a window into Freuds texts that yields exciting new
insights, including the idea that a transformative version of translation, a
perception of the way Freud thinks creatively, may help psychoanalysts
of different cultures and systems of thought communicate across boundaries.
Andr Greens concept of the pathological negative is used as an example
of how Grossmans Freud can facilitate a crossing of cultural and
theoretical boundaries.

I perceived ever more clearly that the events of human history, the interactions
between human nature, cultural development and the precipitates of primaeval
experiences (the most prominent example of which is religion) are no more than a
reflection of the dynamic conflicts between the ego, the id and the superego, which
psychoanalysis studies in the individualare the very same processes repeated
upon a wider stage.
Freud (1925, p. 22) quoted by Grossman (1998, p. 474)

Training and Supervising Analyst and teaching faculty, the Training Institute of
the NewYork Freudian Society, the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute, and NPAP.
To the memory of William I. Grossman, with gratitude for his intellectual gen-
erosity, and to the memory of Charles Brenner, who attended to an early draft of this
paper and challenged me to make a case for the value of Grossmans thinking. Our
world is the lesser for their leaving. A very different version of this paper was pre-
sented at a panel on translation at the IPA Congress in Berlin, August 2007. Submitted
for publication August 4, 2008.
DOI: 10.1177/0003065108329879
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 Gail S. Reed

A lthough William I. Grossman was one of the most creative

psychoanalytic thinkers of the past thirty years, his ideas, densely
compacted into seminal papers, do not easily yield their richness. He has left us,
nevertheless, with a treasure trove of original and stimulating ideas, each worth
the considerable work it takes to unpack. One, developed principally in two
papers published in the 1990s (Grossman 1992, 1998), is a remarkable description
of the systematic way Freud imagines, thinks, and theorizes. This characteristic
template is, as Grossman shows us, discernible well before Freud became the first
psychoanalyst (Freud 1891).
Although I will refer to Grossmans reading of Freud as Grossmans
Freud, it is useful to keep in mind that this characteristic way of thinking is
Freuds mode of thought, though he was unaware of it, and not Grossmans
creation. It is, however, Grossmans discovery and so powerful a window into
Freuds texts that it opens new perspectives for many readers. In my case,
reading Grossmans Freud I was struck by the importance of an unusual
version of what Grossman sometimes refers to as translation in Freuds
thinking. In what follows, I will attempt to explicate this version of translation,
the role it plays in Freuds system of thought, and some uses to which it
might be put.
Translation is usually seen to involve interchangeable lexical equivalents
across languages. That is, we understand it to indicate an equivalence in the
signifier of an object in one language, say Spanish, with the signifier of that
same object in another language, for example, English. Thus, perro and dog
both refer to the same animal and are taken to be equivalents. One might
surmise then that translation aims at maintaining meaning as exactly as
possible, and this is, indeed, the most common use of the term.
This most basic meaning of translation has frequently been applied,
by analogy, to a clinical event that culminates in an interpretation of
unconscious material, the translation of derivatives into an unconscious
fantasy, for example. Arlow (1969) has described the complex steps
involved in arriving at such an interpretation. The unconscious fantasy in
his example concerns the patients devouring and destroying his mothers
breasts, and the analyst deduces it from derivatives in the patients
description that include his squeezing oranges that morning in the
presence of a wife experienced as resentful, unhelpful, and envious. If
one hews to the meaning of translation noted above, however, such an
analogy would imagine the act of translation in too restrictive a manner
to capture the clinical work being described.

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 TRANSLATION IN WILLIAM I. GROSSMANS FREUD

What is creeping into the metaphoric application of translation to such a

clinical interpretation is an important etymological root: like the word transference,
the word translation denotes a carrying across and suggests an action of
articulation, connection, and transformation. Clinically, it is undoubtedly the
patients affect in his description of squeezing oranges that carries the material
across the conscious-unconscious divide from the conscious account of an action
to the understanding of an unconscious fantasy.
The boundaries to be crossed can be of many different types, including
those between languages, mental states, contexts, or systems of thought. This
less common version of translation, which I will term transformative, is what
Freud means in the quotation that is the title of this paper when he writes of
the connection by means of the letters of the alphabet between the systems
alphabet and poem. He is actually using this analogy to describe a change of
functional significance in the brain (Freud 1891, pp. 5253; quoted by
Grossman 1992, p. 33), but his analogy well illustrates a variety of other
border crossings and transformations of function. In his analogy, the letters
are continuous from one system to the next, but the two systems are different.
The poem is more complex than the alphabet, and the function of letters in
forming words for the poem is correspondingly more complex than the
function of the letters in the alphabet. The system of the alphabet continues
to be used in the more complex system, however. The carrying across is
accomplished through the new use of an older system.
Since awareness of transformative translation may help analysts address the
pressing problem of communicating across at least some of the divides of culture,
theory, and semantics that exist within our larger psychoanalytic thought
community, I will take a brief detour to describe the general difficulties of
communication that analysts face in this area; I will then read Grossmans
reading of Freud to show in more detail the significant work of translation that
emerges. Finally, I will try to demonstrate how an understanding of translation in
Freuds thinking might help us rethink the problem of communication.

T H E N E E D F O R T R A N S L AT I O N A C R O S S PA R A D I G M S

When analysts from different schools or geographic areas try to talk with one
another, a work of translation analogous to (and sometimes simultaneous with)
that across languages may be necessary. Translation here refers to the way we
attempt to render comprehensible our individual psychoanalytic thinking to the
larger psychoanalytic field, as well as to the efforts we make to understand what

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 Gail S. Reed

each of us is saying to the other when we try to speak together about patients and
by extension when we use systems of thought, or speak about systems of thought,
that permit us to believe that we understand patients.
The need for translation in this context is a result of our present eclecticism
and implies the existence of major divergences in two categories: the systems we
use to understand ourselves and our patients, or our formulations, and the way we
talk about that understanding, or our expression. Differences of expression can be
resolved by lists of lexical equivalents found in glossaries of technical terms or in
dictionaries. Differences in systems of thought are more complex and daunting.
To mention one aspect, change in a system of thought is often uneven and
incremental and therefore unsystematic and potentially confusing. Self psychology,
for example, retained the clinical use of free association while dispensing with
the Freudian theory of drive and the laws of unconscious transformation and
disguise that originally justified the radical introduction of a cure based on the
clinical use of free association (Reed 1987). I am not here questioning the value
of another system of thought, but merely pointing out that the uneven way a
system of thinking changes frequently leads to confusion and lack of
comprehension.
Moreover, because technical terms emerge from networks of shared
associations and these networks may come to constitute a psychoanalytic culture
with its own dialect, the two categories, systems of thought and their expression,
are not easily separable. The ego psychological concept of object constancy is not
equivalent to the Kleinian idea of the depressive position, despite the fact that both
refer to a differentiated relationship with a whole-object representation,
simultaneously loved and hated. Within each system of thinking, the contexts of
the terms differ, making them much more than the sum of their similarities.
These changes then support new changes. Ideas based on already
derivative premises expressed in a vocabulary new and strange become
condensed into a particular psychoanalytic dialect and become the building
blocks of ever newer and less recognizably expressed ideas. Given the
predominance of an oral tradition in psychoanalytic learning and transmission,
we cannot be surprised at the development of such regional ways of thinking
and expression, diverse compressions of ideas idiosyncratic to subgroups that
share training and clinical interactions (Reed 1994). These condensations
impede mutual understanding outside the subgroup, even when a text has
been translated (in the conventional sense) from one language to another.
The very task of reviewing a book that uses an unfamiliar system of
thought poses enormous difficulties. Reviewers of such books are the
translators of psychoanlytic concepts, on the front lines of the struggle to

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 TRANSLATION IN WILLIAM I. GROSSMANS FREUD

maintain communication. Here concepts need to be made relevant to readers

unfamiliar with them, and with the context from which they emerge, so that they
do not remain abstract and disconnected from the clinical experiences analysts
may share. This takes a great deal of work. What follows is an excerpt from the
third draft of a book review by Irene Cairo explaining a Latin American authors
new ideas about linking. The review, which I encountered in my capacity as
JAPAs associate book review editor for foreign books, was rewritten at least
twice more before its eventual publication (Cairo 2007).

[The author of the book] distinguishes two different approaches to the link. . . .
In the first one, the classical, each subject has predetermined potentialities that
are or can be actualized in the experience of the link, but the encounter does not
basically alter the two subjects. There is a tendency to homeostasis and a limit
to whatever is possible, a limit then predetermined by the potentialities of both
subjects. But the new conceptualization [of the link] is radically different.
According to it, the link both determines and impacts on both subjects. Each
instant defuses the between us, in fact the us is not two complete, stable
subjects. The link that both subjects share defines them at each instant. The
effects of the encounter are not predetermined. The difference would be between
the vision of transference as a displacement onto the analyst of a prior experi-
ence and the experience co-created between the two participants.

To understand the new concept of linking, the reviewer must steep herself in the
ideas originating in the psychoanalytic culture of the author (here, standard ideas
about linking as a background for the newer ideas about linking) and in doing so
absorb the thinking, expressions, and conventional condensations of the authors
entire thought community. To explain the concept, however, the reviewer must
keep one foot in the subcommunity of her readers as well, where there is little
familiarity even with the basic ideas about linking, to say nothing about the new
ones. To avoid dooming the text to the incomprehensibility of a failed translation,
the reviewer must construct bridges like that in the last sentence I have quoted.
Such construction involves embedding the new concepts in networks of
associations that evoke clinical situations familiar to her audience.
Awareness of transformative translation may make it easier to locate
such bridges. This would be true, for example, were we able to find the point
at which a familiar system of thought is transformed into an unfamiliar one.
In addition, commonalities in systems of thought, both those recognizable in
Freud and those discovered in the organization of less familiar material,
would enable us to move from one system to another more freely. To be able
to find these bridges, however, it is important first to recognize Freuds
process of thinking, and not to think of his theory as a static set of ideas.

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 Gail S. Reed

Freud left us a partial record of his evolving thought, at times revising

major formulations while leaving behind, but not discarding, earlier concepts.
The revision of the theory of anxiety (Freud 1926) did not lead to the
disappearance of the actual neuroses, nor did the change from the topographic
to the structural theory (Freud 1923) eradicate the concept of the preconsious
from our vocabulary. The history of the concept of the transference neurosis
is a smaller example of this phenomenon (Reed 1994). These contradictions
are not as important as the fact that Freud left us a relatively stable body of
thought that is also a record, in statu nascendi, of his changing thinking. We
are the heirs of this evolution, not of one static theory. Although we have
tended to assert the truth of particular interpretations of one or another aspect
of his theories, or of theories that contradict his ideas, and although we have
mostly sought and/or offered coherent edited truths, it is the process of
thinking Freud exemplified that may be his central contribution.
William I. Grossmans brilliant reading of Freuds psychoanalytic mode of
thought1 captures this element in a way no other writer with whom I am familiar
has been able to do; it is Grossmans thinking about Freuds thinking that has led
me to give a significant place to the role of translation in Freud.

GROSSMANS FREUD

My reasons for finding Grossmans Freud illuminating are several. First,

Grossman approaches Freud not by singling out a particular content of his
theory, but by identifying a specific formal organization in the process of
Freuds thinking. This model predates Freuds psychoanalytic formulations
and exemplifies his theories at the same time as it organizes his thinking. It
allows him great flexibility and breadth: it facilitates recognition of similarities
among hierarchical systems or entities, substitutions of similar systems or
entities, connections among similar systems or ideas, and transformations
between related systems. It does this much as do the unconscious processes
he will uncover in his work on the psyche. As a result, Grossman finds in
Freudian theory an elasticity and expandability that make it applicable
in many different circumstances and at many different levels of specificity or
generalization. In its flexibility and expandability it is not merely a relic
of the past but is relevant today, encompassing many of the preoccupations
of current theoretical debates.
Second, Grossman emphasizes the way in which Freuds theory addresses
content and process at the same time, reminding us that it is both a theory of
the mind and a method of analyzing the products of the mind.

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 TRANSLATION IN WILLIAM I. GROSSMANS FREUD

Third, Grossman reminds us that Freuds psychoanalytic mode of

thought is both a theory of the mind and a method of analysis of, among
other things, theories of the mind.
Finally, the device that permits this flexibility and expansion is the type
of transformative translation to which I have been referring, a translation that
operates not between lexical equivalents, but between systems, integrating
the simpler into the more complex. What might be seen only as a formal
element in the articulation of a theory is thus available to us also as a means
to continue development, expansion, and change.
These related functions occur, Grossman points out, because the
psychoanalytic mode of thought is unique in centrally addressing the effort to
describe the analysts use of his self-observation as a tool in the study of his
patients and their self-observations (1992, p. 58). In other words, we require a
way of moving from the self-observation of the analyst when in the presence of
a self-observing patient to an understanding of what our self-observation reveals
about the patient and then, more widely, about many patients. This effort then
constitutes a translation of a personal subjective reaction into an understanding of
another individual. It is a carrying over of a small subjective observation to
something that aims to articulate a second subjectivity and thereby the only kind
of objectivity possible to us. The articulation of this second subjectivity makes
use of our personal subjectivity but is not our own. As it is not our own, it aims
for objectivity. This step and the method we use to describe it are at the core of
both psychoanalytic theory construction and clinical work. Both necessarily
place transformative translation at their center.
This work may not, at first glance, seem to embody transformative
translation. However, the movement from self-observation to the understanding
of another person is an act of translation in which the system that carries out the
self-reflective act of understanding ones reactions becomes a functionally
different system when the analyst takes those reactions and applies them to the
understanding of another. A further translation into a functionally more complex
system occurs in generalizing about other persons.
To illustrate the development of self-observation into increasingly
generalized and complex systems of understanding through transformative
translation, an analysis of how this process works in a treatment context
might be helpful. Imagine that the analyst of Mr. X notices that she feels
uncharacteristically remote and detached as she listens to her patient
describe his disenchantment with his current girlfriend and the sexual
efforts and demands his less than enthusiastic attitude are occasioning from

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 Gail S. Reed

this woman. She wonders why she feels so like an exiled onlooker. It is a
strange and unfamiliar state. Could it be related to the patient and what he is
saying?
This self-observation is part of a relatively simple system: a recognition
of an unfamiliar subjective reaction; a comparison of the analysts usual state
of mind with the present one; a recognition of the context in which the
unusual state of mind is occurring. All this leads to a question about whether
the unusual state of mind might be connected to the context in which it is
occurring. We might call this system a subjective one.
However, another system is required in order for the observation to be
used to understand the mental life of Mr. X. In the context of the question
about why her strange feelings are occurring, the analyst needs to make a
judgment about Mr. Xs attitude toward what he says as he speaks to her
about his girlfriends efforts and demands. To arrive at a judgment about Mr.
Xs feelings in this matter, the analyst listens for, among other things, the
patients tone. At the same time, she monitors the way he uses language,
attempting to correlate the form of the patients expression with his meaning.
The attempt to arrive at an estimation of Mr. Xs attitude requires a trial
translation of self-knowledge into forms of expression: How many ways
could I feel in this circumstance and how would I express any of these
feelings? If I said this, how could I mean it and how would I express that
meaning? Her judgment is that the patient seems to be showing off to his
analyst both his girlfriends increasing efforts to interest him and the way his
rejection has occasioned it. We might call this system of understanding a
subjectively objective one.
The analyst next formulates a question that involves both her subjective
observation of herself and her subjectively objective observation of her patient.
How might her feeling like an exile be connected to the patients self-satisfaction
as he describes his girlfriends efforts to interest him in sex? The answer to the
question requires many more observations than can be detailed here, as well as
hypotheses that correspond to the new sets of observations.
Assume nevertheless that as the analyst thinks about her patients mind,
she associates to the fact that Mr. X has often complained of feeling like an
observer, perpetually excluded from life. The analyst is here moving between
two systems: her subjectively objective thinking about her patient and her
subjective associations about him from her direct experience of the treatment.
A third system is emerging as she introduces hypotheses to explain the
interdependence of her two sets of observations.
The analyst notices the similarity of the state she is experiencing to
what Mr. X has described. She wonders if she is not feeling precisely the
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 TRANSLATION IN WILLIAM I. GROSSMANS FREUD

way Mr. X frequently complains about feeling. Perhaps the patient is

putting the analyst in a situation of exclusion that reverses a situation in
which Mr. X originally found himself excluded. Perhaps he is putting
himself now in a situation in which he is a desired participant with a
woman, and in control of rejection to boot, while the analyst is an
onlooker excluded from love and human contact.
This tentative formulation allows the analyst to associate to the
patients early history: he shared a bedroom with his parents from the age
of two until he was four and a half. She thinks, further, how often after
vacation breaks Mr. X has described a fantasy of being alone, out in the
cold, peering in the window watching as she celebrates a winter holiday
by the fire with her family. Moreover, in the interaction he describes with
the woman he is beginning to reject, she realizes that he is removing
himself from human warmth perhaps for vindictive reasons.
Here she may draw on an already established system of clinical theory and
entertain the idea that Mr. X is enacting a primal scene trauma, but reversing the
roles in an attempt at mastery. This construction, though extremely tentative,
could account, she sees, for both the analysts self-observation and what she
believes the patient is feeling. It would also speak, as it turns out, to the patients
reason for seeking analysis: his difficulty with relationships.
As a tentative explanation, this hypothesis opens areas of exploration
beyond the reductive identification of a trauma. It is possible to speculate, for
instance, that this leitmotif of exclusion, in either passive or active form, is so
pervasive in Mr. Xs life that it shapes how he relates to everyone he tries to
love, or who loves him. It is similarly possible that in his inner life he
excludes himself from knowing his warm, positive feelings, just as he
excludes himself from warmth in interpersonal relations. Here we would see
a pattern of exclusion of self or other present in different systems so that the
analysts experience exemplifies the recursive structures of Mr. Xs mind.
What Grossman essentially offers us in studying Freuds psychoanalytic
mode of thought is just such a central organizing schema, the equivalent of a
grammar for linguists. He shows us that there is a consistent model underlying
Freuds many and different theoretical contents; moreover, it is a model that,
through the work of translation, is infinitely expandable, spatial, nonlinear,
coherent, flexible, and far-reaching.
Grossman sees Freud as having derived this model from the structure,
spatial arrangements, and language of the neurological model he first
presented in On Aphasia in 1891. Freuds reliance on a single model to

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 Gail S. Reed

explain conceptualizations as diverse as psychic functioning, social

functioning, interpersonal phenomena, and some aspects of biology
(Grossman 1992, pp. 2829) leads to characteristics in Freuds writings that
are often criticized, such as the use of the same word in varying contexts. The
term transference, for example, refers early on to quite different sorts of
psychic activity. It takes some time for the reader to recognize that these uses
of the term have in common systems involving substitution, representation,
and displacement, of both meaning and value. Grossman comments:
Substitutions of objects and displacements of meaning and value are . . .
necessarily related. Freud emphasized one or another of these elements when
describing the relation between conscious and unconscious fantasies and the
way the mental aparatus develops. . . . In this way he created a picture of the
mind as a hierarchical structure of agencies, functions and fantasy
organizations in which complexity resulted from the combination of relatively
simple relations and operations (1992, pp. 2930).
Grossmans description of the neurological model in Freuds monograph on
aphasia is useful for clearly showing the basic components of the underlying
organizational (or potentially bridging) system, despite the fact that it predates
his psychoanalytic thinking. I cite Grossman here not for the neurology, but for
the concise description of the central and unchanging organization itself.
Grossman points out that Freud was interested in the way speech is learned, the
way sounds and associations make up words in the brain, and the way object
images and their associations are recorded and associated to words. Freud placed
these problems in a chain that begins with the surface of the body and ends with
the organization of mental functions and their expressions. The result is a
hierarchical series of systems within which are clusters of elements. The systems
are separated by boundaries. The contents of one system are transferred,
translated, transformed as they are represented in another system. Neither the
contents of the system nor the hierarchy itself are linear in their organization
(1992, p. 32; emphasis added.)
Grossman proceeds to arrange the several systems: Each half of the
brain-mind system is made up of components connected by pathways. . . .
The speech apparatus contains various speech and language functions having
their own nodes and pathways. The system of word presentations is then
placed in relation with another system, the system of object presentations.
Each of these systems, too, has its own organization (p. 37).
What Grossman has described is a hierarchy of systems separated
by boundaries. Any two separate organizations are often related to one
another as representations. Within each of the systems, a similar structure

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 TRANSLATION IN WILLIAM I. GROSSMANS FREUD

of chains of elements is repeated (p. 37). This model, Grossman notes,

is recursive. A model is recursive when a number of systems of similar
structure are combined to form a larger system having the same structure
as the smaller systems. . . . Recursive models often involve feedback, as
does Freuds (pp. 3738).
Grossman then shows Freuds psychoanalytic theory to be hierarchical
and stratified in the same way as the original neurological model. He
delineates Freuds describing groups of smaller entities, each with
specific functions, combining during development into larger, more
complex entities with changed functions. Each individual system is also
an entity with boundaries. Transformative translation is a nonlinear
articulation between systems. It is both the connection between systems
and the way that a simpler system becomes an element in a larger system
that is transformed in its function.
Thus, both the theory and the psychoanalytic mode of thought depend
centrally on a type of translation that involves a carrying over to another
context, a connecting, and a transformation. Dominique Scarfone has
suggested that such transformative translation is related to transduction, a
way of translating between two heterogeneous forms of matter/energy. For
instance, the electric current in a telephone line requires a transductor (also
called an effector) to translate it into the human voice, although the voice is
certainly not electric current but airwaves (personal communication).
At issue is the carrying over of one system of hierarchical stratification
across boundaries into another, similarly hierarchical, but more (or less)
complex system. One self-contained hierarchical series may become a single
stratified representation within another system. Freud chooses (and Grossman
cites without comment) the stunning example I have already discussed: the
relation of the letters of the alphabet to a poem. The letters of the alphabet
constitute a hierarchical system within boundaries. A poem is a second
system, but the letters that go into it have been made into words and the
words into meanings that evoke affects. The first system exists within the
second, but has been subsumed, functionally transformed through
translation.
When Grossman turns to how Freud moved from physiological to
psychic processes, he notes that Freud concluded that it was unworkable to
locate mental systems in specific parts of the body. Instead Freud hypothesized
a double registration in systems that were related by inexact parallelism
(Grossman 1992, p. 34). The systems Ucs. and Cs. are two such inexact

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 Gail S. Reed

parallels that belong to this hierarchy of systems. When Freud, writes

Grossman, considered whether the transposition of an idea from the Ucs. to
the Cs. requires a second registration, he decided that for an idea to enter the
second system, the introduction of words to the idea of the object (p. 35)
is necessary.
This conclusion, comments Grossman, turns double registration into
a type of translation (p. 35; emphasis added). That is, the relation between
the thing presentation in the system Ucs. and the word presentation in the
system Cs. is an example of translation in the sense we have been discussing.
There are two systems, Ucs. and Cs. The first is simpler, the second more
complex. Like the letter, the thing presentation exists in both systems, linking
the one to the other, but only the system Cs. contains the registration of the
word presentation as well. The moment that word presentations are introduced
into this second system, so too are processes of judgment, reality testing,
thinking, and displacement, so that the thing presentation can be disguised
and pleasure can be found in attenuated forms (see Freud 1911). It is a system
that functions very differently from the simpler system, yet uses the
components of the simpler system.
Translation, in Grossmans account, occurs in the linking of system to
system. Besides the linking that occurs in the making conscious of something
unconscious, linking can occur in the related tasks of presenting a verbal
description of the nonverbal spatial model in presenting the theory (p. 39), as
Grossman is doing in his exposition of Freuds thinking, or in the translation of
the symptomatic images and perceptions into verbal interpretations (p. 39) in
the psychotherapy of hysteria, as Freud might have done in interpreting the
fantasy causing the paralysis of a limb in one of his early patients. There can also
occur a failure of translation, and the translation of that failure can result in
psychopathology. As Grossman (1992) points out, when Freud described
memory in a letter to Fliess in 1896 (Freud 1896, pp. 207208) he wrote that
our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification: the
material present in the form of memory traces being subjected from time to time
to a rearrangement . . . to a retranscription . . . [M]emory is present not once but
several times over . . . (1992, p. 40). Grossman noted that Freud added that
successive epochs of life lead to successive registrations and translations of
psychic material. In the psychoneuroses, some of the material isnt translated.
Repression is this failure of translation (Freud 1896, p. 208; quoted in
Grossman 1998, p. 471).
This is an important point. Repression is pathological because, in
taking word presentations away from the thing presentation, it blocks

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access to the systems Pcs. and Cs. That is, it cuts off the possibility of
translation between systems, impedes the building of more complex
systems, and, at least in the language of the Freud of 1893, maintains the
isolation of both unacceptable ideas and the affects associated with them
so that the ideas cannot be dispersed, or the affects discharged. It thus
creates the conditions for the appearance of an unintelligible language of
the body, the return of the repressed in the form of conversion.
To return now to the issue of the translation of derivatives into an
unconscious fantasy, one might say that the interpretation of an unconscious
fantasy from a series of derivatives in a patients association is not a
translation on the perro/dog model at all, but rather is an attempt to supply
the missing translation in the transformative sense so that repression is no
longer necessary. That is, the interpretation of an unconscious fantasy is not
a translation in the sense of a lexical equivalent. It is an attempt to remove the
fantasy from its isolation and reintegrate it into a functioning system of
associations, condensations, and displacements. Translation on the perro/dog
model is more of a substitution; transformative translation is an articulation
that expands and allows for the creation of other articulations, displacements,
and compromises.
Indeed, the translation of self-contained series of stratified elements into
other self-contained series of stratified elements leads ultimately, as Grossman
points out, to a building up of superimposed agencies (Freud 1901, p. 147;
quoted in Grossman 1998, p. 471). The processes of defence lead to compromise
formations and the progressive building up of complexity. This is an aspect of
development leading to new mental structures (agencies) within which earlier
steps in mental developement are preserved in modified form in the later ones
(p. 471). Memory traces of the relation to a caregiver combine in different
arrangements to create aspects of the ego, as well as of the superego.
Transformative translation thus functions to provide for one mnemic image to
appear in different stratified hierarchies, metamorphosed within systems and
across boundaries. The recognition of these recursive rearrangements of
stratification provides a potential means of weighing and classifying changes that
may occur in psychoanalytic theory. Modifications ought ideally to be considered
translations not in the restrictive sense of lexical equivalents but in the expansive
transformative sense.
Applying Freuds psychoanalytic mode of thought implies no
significant theoretical restriction. Among the principles of mental
functioning that appear and reappear at different strata are several that are

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quite comprehensive and contemporary. The complemental series, for instance,

lends a complex dual perspective to the process of structure building. The
following example of the ramifications of the substitution of the pleasure principle
for the reality principle, offered by Grossman, will serve two purposes: first, it
illustrates the pivotal role attributed by Freud to the complemental series in that
structure building; second, it shows the function of transformative translation in
constructing ever more complex entities.
This series begins with an aspect of individual adaptation and ultimately
encompasses the development of social institutions. Freud, writes Grossman,
understood the substitution of the reality principle for the pleasure principle
as being accompanied by projection of its endopsychic perception into the
outside world in the form of religious belief in the afterlife. This belief
provides a view of reality that contributes to and supports inner controls
(1998, p. 472). As Grossman notes, Freud indicates that reality exerts an
influence on the formation of psychic structures through the internalisation
of external prohibitions. What starts as an external prohibition by reality
becomes an internal prohibition by the reality principle. This creates the
agencies. . . . However, that dissatisfaction, which results from the
replacement of the pleasure principle by the reality principle, is itself part of
reality (Freud 1911, p. 224; quoted in Grossman 1998, p. 472). That is,
says Grossman, the adaptation to reality produces new psychic situations
that must be dealt with and the struggle against prohibitions continues now
on two fronts (p. 472). Here we can see translation as articulation and
transformation leading to changes in function at each level of complexity.
The duality of perspective provided by taking into account the
complemental series as functions change and systems become more
complex can again be perceived in Freuds reflecting on the relationship
of mind to the world within which the mind creates its own version of the
world (p. 480) and about the way cultural formations provide a kind
of group mind in which each generation understands unconsciously the
unconscious message contained in what is transmitted by upbringing,
customs, tradition and education (p. 480). Grossman locates the source
of these ideas in Freuds contemporaneous increasingly rich conceptions
of the usual role of projection, identification and narcissism in the mental
life of the individual and of the family (p. 480).
This idea of the unconscious understanding of the unconscious of others
is another more widely encompassing principle than modern readers might
have anticipated. It is Freuds . . . version of developmental and clinical
intersubjectivity (p. 480). It is also the beginnings of a theory of object

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relations and the reason that children can identify with the parents
unconscious (p. 480). There is, of course, a parallel to these ideas in Freuds
writings on another system, that of transference, this time as a strictly clinical
concept. Not only does the combination of disposition and early experience
produce a number of stereotype plates that are repeated multiple times, but
transferences have variable contributions from the past and the present,
disposition and present circumstances (p. 482; emphasis added).
Indeed, we might say that both of the links Cairo was struggling to
describe in her draft are already adumbrated in Freud; his ideas could
have been used to clarify the distinction between links, had we a collective
grasp of the way transformative translation functions to expand our
theoretical horizons.
The contributions of both unconscious motivation and present
circumstances also emerge in Freuds thinking about systems of thought.
Grossman points out that in contemplating anthropological data, Freud treats
nonanalytic commentators ideas and observations as though they are
associations and manifest contents with underlying psychological and conceptual
unity and meaning. . . . He finds a unifying psychological thread that he believes
lies behind the observations and explanations offered by investigators, natives
and patients. As he eventually indicates, all of these explanations and their
associated systems of thought are like secondary revision that rationalises
obscured psychological motives. Every conscious judgement has both conscious
and unconscious reasons (Grossman 1998, p. 476).
Grossman shows Freud comparing neurotic systems to systems of totemic
thought and to animism, and developing a theory of systems: Thus a system is
best characterized by the fact that at least two reasons [Motivierungen] can be
discovered for each of its products: a reason based upon the premises of the
system (a reason, then, which may be delusional) and a concealed reason, which
we must judge to be the truly operative and the real one (Freud 19121913, pp.
9596; cited in Grossman 1998, p. 478).

DISCUSSION AND EXAMPLE

Transformative translation conceived of as a process at the very core of

psychoanalysis connects the analysts self-observation with an understanding
of the subjectivity of an other, and that understanding with a more general
statement through which the description of the self-observational method
leads to the taking shape of a theory. Thus, transformative translation operates
at the center of both clinical work and psychoanalytic theory-making.

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Translation, in this sense, connects hierarchical systems within

boundaries with each other by using a simpler system as an element in a
more complex system. Thus the system of the alphabet, its letters attached to
specific sounds, is translated into the letters making up the words of a
poem; equally, aspects of the relationship of a mother and child can be
translated into aspects of the ego structure of the child, and events of
human history can be translated into an intrapsychic conflict among agencies,
as Freud remarks in the epigraph at the beginning of this article (1925, p. 22).
From the standpoint of the topographic theory, the movement from
unconscious to preconscious requires the translation of thing presentation
into word presentation. Transformative translation would also be involved in
the way that memory traits are transcribed, stored, and retranscribed and in
the way condensation and displacement operate creatively to construct
compromises enabling human beings to live in civilization.
Repression involves a failure of transformative translation. This failure
is more easily seen in terms of the topographic theory, where repression
removes the word presentation from the thing presentation and bars the latter
from access to the preconscious. In terms of the structural theory, repression
can be understood to block the individuals capacity to translate conflicted
unconscious wishes into adequate displacements, compromises, and/or
sublimations. An interpretation that reveals the unconscious fantasy or wish
at the appropriate time may restore this capacity to translate.
Finally, translation that transforms from a less complex to a more
complex system builds structure. It is thus creative. As a significant part
of a mode of thinking, it enables us to make connections among systems
and to imagine more and more encompassing entities, from the subjectivity
of an other to the way social institutions such as religion are transmitted
through unconscious identification.
How might we use Grossmans Freud, and the central concept of
transformative translation I have identified, to help us understand unfamiliar
concepts couched in difficult-to-comprehend abstract condensations? It
would be helpful to become comfortable with the recursive model of this
mode of thought and to try to discern the hierarchical, stratified, and
multifaceted structure it describes in whatever theoretical context we find
ourselves. It might, then, become possible to determine whether the recursive,
stratified series of inexactly parallel systems that we see in Grossmans Freud
are present in any newer theory. If we discovered they are, our work would
consist either in identifying the inner translations that led from the original
Freud to the newer theoretical system, or in identifying those that exist within

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the new system, just as Grossman has so convincingly shown them to exist
in Freud.
In either case, the existence of inexactly parallel systems is the kind
of bridge needed to connect one system of thought with another. If
inexactly parallel systems are located completely within a newer system
of thinking, the formal similarity of the systems in inexact parallelism
would create a system similar to the formal structure of thought in
Grossmans Freud. This formal similarity would constitute a bridge. If a
system in a newer theoretical construction is found to be similar to one in
Freud, it could constitute a connection by content.
To glimpse how this process might play out, let us briefly consider
the idea of the pathological negative introduced into psychoanalytic
theory by Andr Green (1975, 1983, 1993). Green is referring to the
individuals inability to represent the primary object internally in a way
that permits its symbolization when the object is absent (Reed in press).
The failure to reach object constancy for him does not result only in an
unstable object representation or imprisonment in the paranoid-schizoid
position (to mention concepts more familiar to us). The failure results in
a hole in the psyche, its affective correlative: emptiness. The primary
object does not exist as an internal object and is therefore not capable of
being symbolized, or represented, in its absence. Instead of a representation
there is a void, the nonperception of a psychic object or phenomenon
that is perceptible (Green 2002, p. 289; translation mine).
This failure has several consequences. Rage and destructiveness are
important features of these patients, but are secondary to the void. If there is
no object representation, this rage cannot be attenuated. It is devoid of
ideation. In addition, patches such as a paranoid version of the object create
the illusion of the eternal presence of the object and defend against the
awareness of overwhelming emptiness. The void also manifests itself through
discontinuity, thereby making us aware, not only of primitive operations such
as splitting in the Kleinian sense, but also of empty spaces between the split
representations. Affect unattenuated by ideation may rush into these spaces,
accounting for a clinical picture of impulsivity.
Greens formulation of the pathological negative diverges in a major
way from Freud by explicitly including the possibility of a void where
Freud imagined a universe of presences (Green 1998). It would seem that
one would be hard pressed to see any parallelism of systems, however
inexact. Freud assumedin analyzable individuals, at leasta mental
universe of extensive networks of associations both similar and contiguous,

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a web finely woven out of memory traces, unconscious wishes, and the
defenses against them, all capable of verbalization. Free association is the
appropriate tool for the work of undoing condensations, displacements,
and defensive disguises as they appear in the patients verbal stream of
consciousness. This work is accomplished, says Green, by deduction.
That is, the analyst deduces a recognizable unconscious fantasy, whether
defensive or more drive-related, from the patterns and derivative contents
he hears in the patients free associations.
This is not the case where voids are at issue. While Green agrees with
the idea of the existence of such a finely woven mental universe in
neurotic patients, he envisages the possibility of rents in this fabric in
borderline and narcissistic patients. The analysts attitude vis--vis this
kind of patient is different from the deducing analyst of the neurotic. The
analyst must accompany the patient into the void, into, that is, his or her
unverbalizable experience. The tool for understanding is less the content
of the patients words than it is the analysts responsive inner states,
because neither the patients words nor his patterns of associations
provide a map. The mode of understanding is induction.
We might notice, however, that we now have two systems inexactly
parallel, the one appropriate for neurotic patients whose psychic structures
are common to Freud and Green, and the other, appropriate for patients
with voids, as formulated by Green. Comparisons around issues of
technique and around methods of listening now become possible.
Greens changes in theory can be understood to be accompanied by
systems of understanding different from those Freud imagined. However, the
system of understanding applies to patients with structures different from the
ones Freud envisaged. There is a parallelism between the system of
understanding and the kind of patient Green seeks to understand, and that
parallelism can constitute a bridge to the system of understanding and the
type of patient Freud worked with. The structural assumptions Green makes
about certain of his patients are different from what Freud assumed about his.
Greens system of understanding them corresponds to the different way he
conceptualizes their structure. Green is going backward to imagine earlier
systems of thinking and experiencing and pairing these systems with systems
of understanding. He is extending Freuds inexactly parallel systems, but in
the direction of less complexity and more primitivity.
Green is surely not alone in venturing into the early preverbal
territory that Freud did not, for the most part, explore. When Freud wrote
of hallucinatory wish fulfillment in the infant, his infant was an hypothesis,

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imagined in chapter 7 of the dream book as part of the explanation of the

visual quality of dreams (Freud 1900; Reed and Baudry 1997). The primitive
aspect of the patients Green discusses is much closer to Winnicotts
experiential infant, and Winnicott has indeed been an important influence on
Greens thinking. Thus, faithful to the complemental series, Green is
introducing the specific, primary object into Freuds predominantly
intrapsychic language. Not only does internal drive tension and its satisfaction
matter, but also how a particular mother responds.
This endeavor has several repercussions. Green is envisaging an inductive
technical stance based on a system that attempts to take into account the
preverbal experience that might be responsible for voids. To be sure, the
analyst observes the growth of the transference and interprets it in such a
patient as Freud taught us to do. However, before that development is
possible, the analyst must first become a new object for the patient (Loewald
1960). To that end, Green envisages a clinical situation where the analyst,
working intuitively and emotionally very close to the patient, uses
countertransference to help the patient put into words what he or she lives but
cannot express (Reed and Baudry 2005).
In Grossmans Freud we have seen the creative aspect of translation linking
systems and constructing agencies. In Greens system we see its intersubjective
corollary, and so discover another inexact parallelism. By defining the analytic
setting and holding to its frame, the analyst provides a space where meaning can
be both recovered and created. That frame, then, becomes the mothers arms, and
the past failure to represent the primary object may in this way be reversed. In
Freuds system, translation among systems creates the structure that is mental
agencies. In Greens, translation of unverbalizable experience into words creates
the structure that precedes agencies.
If there is a strong object relations and intersubjective dimension to
Greens thinking, he does not by any means ignore drive or curtail its role.
Instead he again works backward, explicitly elaborating less complex
hierarchical systems that are precursors of the hierarchical system of the
Freudian drive derivative. In this way Green sketches a hierarchical landscape
of systems more primitive than the one Freud for the most part moved in, but
that, in combining, approach Freuds starting point.
Green, basing his argument on a reading of Freud, describes two
forerunners of the drive derivative. First is the psychic representative of
the drive, that is, the representation in the mind of accumulating somatic
tension. Second is the ideational representative of the drive. These are the

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memory traces of satisfaction, should they have occurred with consistency,

which create wishes for new satisfactions. The two aspects unite in the
drive derivative only with relatively consistent satisfaction of the drive
tension. Otherwise one sees impulsive action devoid of meaning, or
potential psychosomatic eruptions that are not symbolic.
Although Green introduces major differences into his theory for what he
calls the nonneurotic patient, he uses the same idea of translation that
Grossman deems central to Freuds thinking. As a result, it is possible to fit
Greens divergences into the patterns of Freuds psychoanalytic mode of
thought. The situation at the heart of the analytic exchange, Green writes,
is to accomplish the return to oneself by means of a detour via the other
(Green 2000, p. 13). This statement is at once similar to and different from
Grossmans point that the uniqueness of analytic theory is its effort to
describe the analysts use of his self-observation as a tool in the study of his
patients and their self-observations (Grossman 1992, p. 58). The two
statements begin at different subjective sites, the one moving from the self-
observation of one subject to that of another subject, the knowledge gained
forming a theory that takes into account the way knowledge is acquired; the
other moves to self-knowledge and ultimate differentiation via a closer kind
of clinical interchange with another. One might say equally of this second
formulation that it is a description of the way knowledge is acquired. But one
can understand Greens as addressed to a more primitive system than is that
of Grossmans Freud.
Green (2000) elaborates his statement in two ways, first intrapsychically:
There is an internal source impelling the drive . . . [toward] investment of an
object, the transference object with an aim, a hope of satisfaction (p. 13).
The drive, he emphasizes, stimulates the childs mind, but the infant cannot
arrange his own satisfaction. Green then translates his intrapsychic formulation
into an intersubjective one, replacing the drive/object interaction with the
infant/mother interaction: In order for the system to work, shared aims must
exist: the desire for satisfaction in the child being echoed by the mothers
desire that he or she be satisfied (p. 15).
We have here two systems that Green finds unsatisfactory as
independent solutions. The intrapsychic solution is that the infants mind
is stimulated by the awakening drive, but the organism by itself is not
capable of obtaining satisfaction; the intersubjective solution rests entirely
on the mothers responsiveness. The first cannot succeed without the
mothers presence, while the second places all initiative with the mother

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and leaves no reason for the childs mind to develop: Progress can only
come from the drive/infantmother/object pair united in an optimal
tension, sufficient to provide hope of a solution and to improve the
efficiency of the childs messages and sufficiently imperfect to supply a
solution only after a relative failure has occurred between the infant and
his mother (p. 16).
Just as the simpler systems of drive components are translated into
the drive derivative under favorable circumstances, here the combined
system is a more complex system than either of its two components and
represents a translation of them into a more complex hierarchical system.
Thus is Freuds thinking applied to more primitive development.
To further deepen his understanding of this complex system, Green turns to
the analyst in the transference. The analyst hears the demand for satisfaction but
instead of responding to it as would the good-enough mother, interprets it. This
interpretation reveals the drive at the same time as it clarifies the nature of the
object. Specifying the relations between the transference object in the patient and
the drives as they operate in the clinical situation, he summarizes: the object is
preconceived, projected, represented, and constructed, whereas the drive is
activated, dynamic, self-organized . . . and subject to transformation (p. 17). This
leads him to a general description of the interplay of drive and object in his
complex intrapsychic and intersubjective clinical system: The construction of
the object leads retroactively to the construction of the drive which constructs the
object (p. 17).
I have gone into these ideas in some detail to show that the type of
translation Grossman identifies in Freud is at work in Greens writing as
he moves from primitive intrapsychic systems to systems of object
relations, to systems characterizing the clinical situation to a more
general theoretical construction. Although the language is neither Freuds
nor our own, the area of interest is not Freuds, and the conception of the
mind is different in a major way, it is possible to recognize in Greens
thinking (whether one agrees with it or not) an understandable and viable
extension of Freuds because the articulation between systems I have
called transformative translation is the same.
I do not intend to suggest that we can apply Grossmans Freud to
every divergent theoretical system. Green, after all, considers himself a
Freudian and consistently refers to his version of Freud. Still, perhaps in
more cases than one might suspect, being aware of the hierarchical
systems in Freud as Grossman describes them may help us find

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corresponding hierarchical systems in an unfamiliar theory. It would do

so, if it were possible, by inspiring us to break down whatever system
might be at issue to see if we could identify the hierarchical structure to
which the new theory is related or from which it has derived, recognizing
the form of its previously existing relation to that structure and becoming
aware of the rules of change by which it has become what it is.
To be sure, not all psychoanalytic theory, even in Freud, obeys the laws
Grossman describes, as he himself has acknowledged. Where an aspect of a
theory, new or old, does not fit the stratified model yet the theory is clinically
useful, we might attempt to translate (in both senses) the theory into Freuds
hierarchical recursive model. If that were to prove impossible, we would then
establish whether its journey into its present form could be traced from ideas
derived from the psychoanalytic mode of thought even though it might early on
have lost the hierarchical and recursive characteristics. At the most extreme, we
could identify a theory as a foreign import, akin to the word jazz in the English
language. In this case we would recognize its contribution, if it seemed true, as
well as the reasons for its necessary uniqueness, or would consider it too foreign
to be integrated. Sometimes, of course, a translation (in the common meaning)
would be disappointing, would have lost its capacity to translate by transforming,
and we would be obliged to indicate that this theory had become impoverished
in the process of its evolution. We would be able to show, however, how this had
happened, that is, which concepts had been eliminated, just as we can show that
when frater becomes frre we lose a syllable.
I think it worthwhile to study Grossmans elaboration of Freuds
psychoanalytic mode of thought and attempt to use it as a beacon in our
theoretical/clinical diaspora. In so doing we may discover with greater
clarity the recurrent patterns of transcription and retranscription and the
accompanying shifts of function that constitute our theoretical architecture
and that lie unnoticed within and among at least some of our many
theories. Whether or not it ultimately helps reduce the Babel of analytic
discourse, we will have learned, from one of the most creative analysts,
to read Freud in a new way.

REFERENCES

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Cairo, I.L. (2007). Review of Ser Humano: Los Vinculos, La Crianza, by

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& Baudry, F.D. (1997). The logic of controversy: Susan Isaacs and
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New York, NY 10128
E-mail: gail.reed@aya.yale.edu

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