Translating Didier Anzieu: Lecture & Book launch with Naomi Segal
Next tuesday, on the 10th May, Professor Noami Segal will present her new translation of Didier Anzieu's book The Skin-Ego in the beautiful London Freud Museum:
" The lecture is in two parts. The first introduces the principles, pleasures & realities of translation, and of translating psychoanalysis in particular. Are all translators murderers, pests or parasites? Are they trustworthy or traitors, or even ‘faithful bigamists’? Might translation be a feminine/feminised activity because most translators are women, or because the target-language has to be maternal, or because it embodies the irony of the multi-skilled serving the mono-skilled? The second part introduces the life and work of Didier Anzieu. The Skin-ego is the theory of a ‘vast metaphor’ based on ‘a paradox: the centre is situated at the periphery’. Freud’s image of the ego as ‘the projection of a surface’ is comprehensively developed, and the sense of touch is ‘not only placed at the origin of the psyche but shown to provide the latter permanently with what might also be called the mental backcloth, the ground upon which psychical contents are inscribed as figures, or the containing wrapping that makes it possible for the psychical apparatus to have contents’. "
Who is Didier Anzieu ?
He was a French psychoanalyst and theorist whose work brings the body back to the centre of psychoanalytic enquiry. He was the author of numerous books and articles, on areas ranging from the psychology of groups and psychodrama to theories of creativity and thought; he also published short stories, literary criticism, a drama, a book of cartoons and a study of May ‘68 written from the heart of Nanterre. His research was always conducted alongside his academic and clinical practice, both characterised by inclusivity, curiosity, a broad mind and a gentle manner. Anzieu’s major work, Le Moi-peau [The Skin-ego], a psychoanalytic theory focused on the psychical skin, is presented here in a new English translation.
Who is Noami Segal ?
She is a professor of modern languages, specialising in comparative literary and cultural studies, gender, psychoanalysis and the body. In 2004 she created and then directed the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, University of London. She has published 15 books, of which the most recent monographs are Consensuality: Didier Anzieu, gender and the sense of touch (2009), André Gide: Pederasty and Pedagogy (1998) and The Adulteress’s Child: authorship and desire in the nineteenth-century novel (1992). Naomi Segal is an Academic Associate of the British Psychoanalytical Society, a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes académiques and a Member of the Academia Europaea.