Upcoming Programs  at the CENTER

Monday, May 8, 6:30 pm: “My Unconscious Speaks Yiddish”: Psychoanalysis and Jewish Languages
Lecture

Join us for a talk by NEH Senior Scholar Naomi Seidman exploring the role played by Yiddish and other Jewish languages in Freud’s writing, from the Yiddish of his parents “behind” his Viennese German to the translations and adaptations of his work in Eastern Europe. In the years since Jacques Lacan first called for “a return to Freud,” a vast literature has arisen around the question of the translation of Freud’s German into English and of the Nazi-era diaspora of psychoanalysts from Central Europe to England and the United States. But Freud’s writing was in some sense already the product of translation and diaspora, from the Yiddish of his parents to his own Viennese German and from Eastern to Central Europe. This is not only a matter of the prehistory of psychoanalysis: Eastern Europe developed its own form of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysts fled to Jerusalem as well as New York and London. In these contexts, Freud’s work circulated in Hebrew and Yiddish among other languages. In this talk, we will explore the Eastern European dimension of psychoanalysis, discussing the Jewish languages “behind” Freud’s German and in the translational “afterlife” of his writings.