From Trauma to Text: A Taxonomy for Psychoanalytic Textual Analysis in Translation

Psychoanalysis has scarcely been applied as an instrument of textual analysis in literary criticism; even fewer cases of this application, either in terms of product or process analysis, exist within the field of translation studies. Consequently in order to develop a psychoanalytic method of textual analysis suitable to translation, the abundant literature on Lacanian psychoanalysis was first revisited to distinguish those paradigms and principles on text most valid for an analysis of psychotic language. The result was a taxonomy of textual elements, either introduced in or else inferred from the field of Lacanian psychoanalysis: non-sensical, anchoring points, cohesion, heteroglossia, la langue, musical competency, and imagery with their sub-types, all elements which permitted text producers/reproducers to vent out their psychoanalytic conflicts (with the discourse in which the subject has functioned) into construction of texts in a manner not unlike psychoanalysis sessions. As an instrument of analysis, the taxonomy here developed, therefore, has the potential to be applied in its totality or partially and with some adaptations into future researches.