Please join the Department of Comparative Literature for a guest lecture by Andreas Mayer, the 2025–26 Dornsife-EHESS Visiting Professor, co-sponsored by the Department of French and Italian.

Please RSVP via this form by Monday, February 16.

Freud in Translation: Towards a Comparative History

Thanks to countless editions, the work of Sigmund Freud is today read all over the world. So far, the history of psychoanalysis has mostly dealt with the personal, institutional and social aspects of this global success story and much less with the history of editions and translations. In my lecture, I will outline a comparative philological-historical approach which focuses on conflicting translational models, thereby departing from the widespread emphasis on psychoanalytic terminology and the problem of untranslatability. The historical case of the long and complex genesis of the English and French complete editions of Freud’s works (James Strachey’s Standard Edition and Jean Laplanche’s Œuvres Complètes) will serve me to show how these classical problems should be addressed in these particular contexts. The history of psychoanalytic translations, I argue, can not only sharpen our sense for a less dogmatic and more genetic reading of a canonical author, but also provide elements for a critique of the currently existing editions and translations.

Andreas Mayer is a historian of science and research professor (directeur de recherche) at the CNRS teaching at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. In 2025–2026 he serves as the Dornsife-EHESS Visiting Professor hosted by the USC Max Kade Institute for Austrian-German-Swiss Studies. Recent awards and fellowships include the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (2019-2020) and the Villa I Tatti in Florence (2024-2025). His research focuses on the historyof the human sciences since 1750 and their multiple relations to literature and the arts. He is the author of several monographs, notably Sites of the Unconscious. Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting (Chicago UP, 2013), and most recently La Marche. Histoire d’une fascination savante (Paris, Belles Lettres, 2025). His current work as an editor and translator includes a new French and German annotated edition of the ‘Analytical Studies’ of Honoré de Balzac’s The Human Comedy.

The USC Dornsife-EHESS Partnership is a multi-year scholarly cooperation agreement with the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS; School of Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences). Housed in the Levan Institute for the Humanities, the partnership aims to build ties between scholars at the two institutions and to support collaborations in research and teaching.