The Psychoanalytic Concept of Transference: Its Applications in Literary and Translation Studies. Transferential Models of Reading

Abstract

Drawing from various understandings of the concept of “transference” in psychoanalysis, this paper seeks to provide a critical overview of its adaptations and uses in the field of literary and translation studies. Focusing on some of the transferential models of reading and translation, it aims to show both how psychoanalysis and literature may inform one another, as well as how the critical reading or the literary translation may be viewed, not as a passive act, but as a two-way relationship characterized by intricate dynamics. In this new perspective, reading therefore becomes a space of the unconscious, while the unconscious becomes a space of reading.

Keywords

• transference
• psychoanalysis
• literature
• translation
• critical reading