Stephen van Beek MA (Tripos), CMC, DCTP, Member CAPT

Translating your Stone

As a psychodynamic therapist, I often find myself thinking about the small reproduction of the Rosetta Stone on my office wall, particularly when in the course of a session a remark reminds me of its history. Its dark surface contains three sets of writings that seem to have nothing to do with each other, just as so many remarks in therapy are apparently not in synch with each other.

Thanks both to Napoleon's imperial ambitions and to his respect for all the sciences, young Jean-Francois Champollion found out how all the messages within the stone.

A great and intuitive scholar Champollion had made himself proficient in the Arabic, Calidonian, Syrianic and Coptic languages by the time he was eighteen. He looked at the black basalt with its three seemingly disconnected texts, and wondered if they were not so unlike after all. Strange hybrid figures, cartouches, stars, suns, and apparently meaningless objects are at the top. Beneath them was a language unknown. And at the bottom was Greek, which he knew.

Based on his profound knowledge of Coptic language, Champollion was able to determine that the three seemingly different texts were all statements of one story, the decree passed by the priests of Memphis in honour of Ptolemy Epiphanes (reigned 205 BC- 181 BC) on the occasion of his accession and coronation, for his bounty to the temples and the priesthood. Having cracked the code of the stone enabled Champollion to unlock other hieroglyphic messages.

Champollion succeeded in his task because he believed decryption through translation was possible. He believed the stone was meaningful, not a random jumble. He was able to decompress the priestly hieroglyphs and found told these symbols of the hieroglyphs contained particular meanings that a member of the priestly class would understand fully; others got versions scaled to who they were in society.

The different levels of meaning in the Rosetta Stone powerfully remind me of there are many ways is which we express our own lives. I believe that part of the function and privilege of the psychotherapist committed to psychodynamic principles is to assist in the process of translating parts of the history of the client between the several levels of symbol, personal reference, common language and general references that constitute a life that can be spoken. Memories, dreams, intuitions, precognitions and insights are also part of the personal text. While we enter therapy speaking like adults, we don't necessarily speak the language that is most authentic for us - that language is one that we will discover in the course of the work largely through the hard and exciting work of translation.

For many clients, therapy is 'about' decoding their own inner lives and developing a deeper and greater capacity to articulate desires, dreams, and plans for the life they need to live. As we become used to the usual experience of being taken for the unique and particular person that we each are, we become increasingly attuned to the capacity to become our own best translator. My own personal work was full of moment in which a particular phrase grasped in a fresh way by my own therapist enabled me to know and see myself in an unexpected and empowering way. The act of translating increasingly enabled me to bridge the gap between the conscious and unconscious parts of my own psyche. I saw my nature through my own language, my dialect of life.

In Shakespeare's time people spoke of translating as 'carrying over' since that is the literal meaning of the word. Just as a bale of cotton is carried across a stream to be woven into the textiles that clothe the body so meanings in one language are to be carried across to another to become mental texts to articulate our experience.

In psychodynamic therapy we have the opportunity to differentiate between the language each of us takes for granted and the language that is our personal dialect and source of strength. And it is one of our deepest longings as human individuals to be understood by another human as an individual, and respected and honoured in that individuality. Successfully getting our message, our 'me-ness', across to another individual, and being able to take in the respect that comes from its full reception by that other person, who truly 'gets' us with our message, is one of the great benefits of therapy.

During those many private moments in my own journey, I came to understand in the flesh that I was a particular being with a particular and subjective voice. There was no obligation to be other than who I was or am; it was a relationship that obliged to honour the work of personal change by being more me. This amounted to my self being given back into my own keeping in order to live my own life at this moment in history.

Champollion had good fortune in having a stone with three versions of a text. He also persevered in his goal and used his mind creatively. May you have as much good fortune in decoding your own message!