Unconscious in Translation
The Translators
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz
Dorothée Bonnigal-Katz is a psychoanalyst based in London and Leamington Spa (West Midlands, UK). A member of The Site for Contemporary Psychoanalysis and the College of Psychoanalysts (UK), she is the founder and the clinical lead of the Psychosis Therapy Project at Islington Mind. She is a leading translator of psychoanalytic theory and philosophy. She has translated essays and books by Laurence Kahn, Jean Laplanche, Dominique Scarfone, Guy Rosolato, Pierre Legendre, Christopher Bollas and Miguel de Bestegui, among others.
Eduardo A. Febles
Eduardo A. Febles was born in Mayagüez, Puerto Rico. He received a B.A. in French and Political Economy from Tulane University, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in French Studies from Brown University. He is the author of Explosive Narratives: Anarchy and Terrorism in the Works of Emile Zola, published by Rodopi Press. He has also edited with his mother, Dr. María Vega de Febles, a collection of articles written by his grandfather entitled Crónicas Ejemplares and published by Ediciones Universal. He is currently Associate Professor of French in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Simmons University in Boston, Massachusetts. In the Valley of Tears is his first translation.
John Fletcher
John Fletcher is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK. He has edited three previous volumes on the work of Jean Laplanche: Jean Laplanche: Seduction, Translation and the Drives (with Martin Stanton), Essays on Otherness, and Jean Laplanche and the Theory of Seduction, a special issue of New Formations, no. 48, Winter 2002-3. He is the author of a number of essays on the work of Jean Laplanche and of Freud and the Scene of Trauma (Fordham University Press, forthcoming).
Jeffrey Mehlman
Jeffrey Mehlman is Professor of French Literature at Boston University, as well as a literary critic and intellectual historian. He is the author of such books as A Structural Study of Autobiography; Revolution and Repetition; Legacies: Of Anti-Semitism in France; Walter Benjamin for Children: An Essay on His Radio Years; Emigré New York: French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan; and, most recently, a memoir: Adventures in the French Trade: Fragments Toward a Life. Mehlman is also a celebrated translator, with his remarkable 1976 translation of Laplanche's Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, and the collection French Freud: Structural Studies in Psychoanalysis, playing an important role in the naturalization of recent French thought in English and American discourse.
Donald Nicholson-Smith
Donald Nicholson-Smith's translation of Laplanche and Pontalis's Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse (The Language of psycho-Analysis, London: Hogarth Press/Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1972; New York: Norton, 1973) is widely recognized as a masterpiece of psychoanalytic translation. Nicholson-Smith has translated many other psychoanalytic writings as well as works by Henri Wallon, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, and Jean Piaget. Born in Manchester, England, he lives in New York city.
Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray is Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory in the School of English at the University of Leeds, UK. He is the author of Tragedy and Otherness: Sophocles, Shakespeare, Psychoanalysis (2009).
Luke Thurston
Luke Thurston is Senior Lecturer in Modern Literature at Aberystwyth University and Director of the David Jones Centre. He is the co-editor of the Routledge Handbook to the Ghost Story (2017), and has published widely on psychoanalysis and literature. He studied with Jean Laplanche at L’Université de Paris VII in the 1990s and is the translator of Laplanche’s Essays on Otherness and The Unconscious and the Id. He is currently translating Laplanche’s The Unfinished Copernican Revolution.