ABSTRACT
Translations is the title of a play by Brian Friel, in which he explores the battle lines between the language of the coloniser and the colonised in the West of Ireland during the nineteenth century. For George Steiner, there are four movements to the process of interpretation and translation of interest to psychoanalysts and hermeneutics, namely trust, aggression, incorporation and restoration. The translation-interpretation analogy works only up to the point of responsibility. Responsibility is central to psychoanalysis. Borges advanced the occult belief of alternative cosmologies, 'counter-worlds', today's multiple universes, interpenetrating one's own free energies of thought. Likewise, 'free association' as the guiding principle in psychoanalysis to circumambulate the truth of the unconscious that Lacan believed contained its own revelation. The translation of the unconscious which Lacan said was structured like a language, fails in the case of repression.
