[This text was the intervention of Ian Parker at the ‘Psychoanalysis and Revolution in Ireland’ symposium, the complete video-recording of which is here]

This book Psychoanalysis and Revolution: Critical Psychology for Liberation Movements is born of translation. I met up with my Mexican comrade David Pavón-Cuéllar in Havana back in 2019, and he told me there should be an accessible introduction to psychoanalysis for activists on the left. I said that we should write it together. We agreed that it should not be another Marxist or Freudian colonisation of political struggles, but that we should try and learn from those different struggles, and explain something of our struggle with psychoanalysis to those who are puzzled about what the big deal is, wonder why we are interested in all this stuff. We are not evangelists for psychoanalysis, or for Marxism for that matter, but we argue that there are some key ideas from psychoanalysis that are liberating, will help the cause of liberation, of revolution.

Outside language

Then the pandemic hit and we all experienced a simultaneous closing of borders and explosion of internet contact, of Zoom and the suchlike. And that meant that David and I wrote the book on email, shuttling the text back and forth between Manchester and Morelia. Our emails to each other are in Spanish, something I struggle with, and the text carries the traces of formulations in English English and Mexican Spanish, and, I suspect, in David’s French-accented Lacanese. We tried our best not to make the book read like a Lacanian book, but those of you who are on the look-out for it will find some of that jargon there too. The plan was that it should appear in Spanish and English, and if possible be translated into other languages, but the Russian publisher, who has now had to flee the country, was fast, was first.

We are translating all the time in the book, backwards and forwards between theories of liberation, of revolution, and theories of unconscious repetitive processes that drive us and, when they drive us into psychoanalysis to talk to a psychoanalyst, reappear in ‘transference’ so we can re-experience them there and reflect on them and do something different with them. That notion of ‘transference’ is perhaps the trickiest, the scariest, the one that operates in the clinic in the relationship between those who speak, the analysands, and those they speak to, the analysts. Those are little jargon words, of course, by the way; the psychoanalyst, or the analyst for short, is the one who often appears to be doing the analysis, and the analysand, the patient – an old medical hangover word there – is the one who actually analyses as they speak.

Anyway, back to transference. Stuff from the outside world gets translated into the clinical space, and our task as revolutionaries is, among other things, to ensure that it is not stuck there. So, as we talk about four key concepts of psychoanalysis in the book – unconscious, repetition, drive and transference – we are translating them into commonsense, to make them accessible, but then pulling back from that, worried that turning psychoanalysis into commonsense will defang it, simply turn it into ideology, pap. I want me pap! (Fail again, fail better.)

Here’s the thing. Revolution worth its salt should be all about translation. It is not a model that is transposed from one part of the world to another, good news about communism or feminism that we export and make appear in other languages; it is about what happens when we break out of our own language, our own way of doing things, and make that revolutionary change rebound from other places, allow it revolutionise ourselves, ourselves at home, at that place we think is home.

And psychoanalysis is all about translation. It is not at all about making us feel at home, but is about enabling us to live away from home, in diaspora, in exile, outside of that romanticised place we are tempted to retreat to, the impossible place that was never actually there in the past but which we might imagine we could return to. The questioning and self-questioning that psychoanalysis facilitates is something that does not rest but launches us into a different relationship with who we’ve been told we are, and it enables us to live with that. It is a relationship with the outside world we had to encounter when we grew up, otherness, and the otherness that became part of us as soon as we began to speak.

There is a fiction around, an ideological fiction that turns psychoanalysis into a comforting illusion compatible with all the mainstream pop-psychological stuff that is all around us now, the fiction that the psychoanalyst translates what the analysand, the patient, says, and turns it into an interpretation that they then feed back to bring about insight, interpretation delivered as a kind of colonising message about what the psychoanalyst knows, knows better. And, in its worst forms, the idea is that the psychoanalyst has good ideas and good morals, is a good moral character, been through their own analysis, cleansed, and so not only should the analysand believe what the analyst says, but they might try to find a way to cure by being like this good person who has told them how to think.

Then that really is close to the kind of colonising process that the revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon railed against. We think we are sometimes outside language, doing our thinking for ourselves, independent of others before we put our thoughts into words, but we are actually always inside language. The question is how we can open up contradictions so there is freedom of movement, and how we can do it in such a way that is attentive to the way that some people are locked in the language of colonisers, of those with power to define what language is and how a life should be spoken of.

Inside language

There is not only translation between languages, but translation inside a language. So, when a psychoanalyst is speaking about the difficulty of working in translation, with an analysand from a different language, say, they are actually encountering something of the nature of psychoanalysis as such. It is said that Freud put people on the couch because, as psychoanalysis gained in popularity, so many English-speaking visitors made up his case-load, babbling away in a language he had quite good knowledge of but was not completely fluent in; he said he could not bear to be stared at for all those hours in a day, but neither could he bear the exhausting task of responding face to face, showing that he understood what they were saying instead of listening in such a way as to enable translation as part of the psychoanalytic process, a crucial part of the psychoanalytic process.

The psychoanalyst should really know better than think they can deliver interpretations from on high, of course, and would know better if they were to take seriously what psychoanalysis tells them about translation. (A side note: Again and again when we English people visit the United States of America we are reminded that we are two countries divided by a common language; I have had this said to me by car hire or rental companies more than once, for example, when I am trying to work out what this or that rule means. Well, we learn something about translation inside language here.) When we are in psychoanalysis, and we are trying, impossible through it is, to obey the fundamental technical rule of psychoanalysis – free association, to speak freely, to say whatever comes into our mind however irrelevant or stupid or unpleasant it is – we learn something about translation ourselves.

So, together, but in different ways that cannot be directly translated between the two of us, the psychoanalyst and their analysand learn something about the nature of language as well as their own nature as human beings, the beings who speak. Here we make a psychoanalytically-informed differentiation, between translation conceived of as ‘communication’, as if there is some kind of magical transfusion of thoughts by way of words, and translation as transformation. It is intriguing to notice here something crucial in the history of psychoanalysis, how careful Freud himself was to distinguish psychoanalysis from telepathy. If telepathy actually happens, Freud thought – well, who knows what he thought, it is what he actually wrote we are concerned with here – then that would cause all kinds of problems for psychoanalysis. Indeed, what would be the point of psychoanalysis if there was direct communication of thoughts from one mind to another. And since Freud did indeed believe in telepathy, he made sure to prohibit discussion of it in psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis is not the same as telepathy, it is a completely different kettle of fish, a fishy kettleful of words jumbled up inside our heads and between us. The stuff of psychoanalysis is the language we use to try and communicate with each other and what we encounter in the language as a kind of barrier instead, as we would wish, a kind of conduit. We do not control the meaning of the words we use, and neither can we control what other people understand by them. And although psychoanalysis is often called the ‘talking cure’, a description that was given by one of the first patients to describe her own experience of the ‘chimney-sweeping’ she thought she was engaging in as she spoke to her doctor, it is not the putting of things into words that has a curative effect but the failure to put things into words and what we learn from that about our relation to others and what we learn about our relation to ourselves.

Conduits and barriers

So here we are, in a space in which there is indeed an illusion of communication, a necessary illusion in which I think I am conveying to you what I want to say and you are understanding it. That space, and the space in the clinic, is not a level playing field, not an open free space in which the words travel around the ground as on a smooth surface. That space, and the clinic in that space, are historically structured spaces, structured by historically-given forms of power; the power of men who believe they speak less than women but actually empirically speak more, the power of those in the colonial realms who believe they have the right to be heard, and so on.

It is sometimes said that a translator is a traitor, that the process of turning one language into another must necessarily involve a degree of twisting and turning. I am cool with that. In fact, I welcome that what might appear in another translation of the link between Psychoanalysis and Revolution might be genuinely revolutionary and genuinely psychoanalytic, in the sense that, in order to be heard in a different context, to be heard in a different language, something new appears, and what is new then turns back and questions, rebels. Tell us something we don’t know.

We don’t speak in conditions of our own choosing. That was a lesson of revolutions, and is also a lesson from psychoanalysis.