TRANSIT

Psychoanalysis, as Carl Schorske claimed, was a child of its own epoch. Marked by the political situation in Austria, Victorian moral codes, the German language and its literary tradition, readings of Classical Greco-Roman culture, and bourgeois middle-European culture, however, Sigmund Freud conceived of psychoanalysis as universal. But when in its early days psychoanalysis began traveling across the world, what came to the fore was its situated and local character rather than its universality. Once established in different locales, psychoanalytic technique adapted to different populations, fundamental texts of the discipline began to be read in other languages, and new psychoanalytic concepts emerged. What made it possible for psychoanalysis to function clinically in other contexts was a process of translation. In this article, I propose to understand the process of translation that takes place in the international circulation of psychoanalysis as one that is informed by the psychoanalytic concept of transference. I explore the kind of translation that psychoanalysis underwent in its international circulation, focusing on its history in India, with specific reference to Girindrasekhar Bose, who founded the Indian Psychoanalytical Society in Calcutta and is often considered the first non-Western psychoanalyst. I focus not only on the versions of psychoanalysis that result from this process of translation as transference, but also on what those translations of psychoanalysis might reveal about Freudian thought.