This essay first appeared in Turkish. The English version is my own. Turkish words and phrases are given in the original with their English sense. Lacan and Freud are cited in the original languages.

Bir varmış, bir yokmuş.

Opening formula of Turkish fairy tales: “Once there was, once there was not.”

I

In 1972, in a short preface written for the Japanese translation of Écrits, Lacan said something unexpected: no one who inhabits this language, Japanese, has any need to be psychoanalysed. His reason was the way Japanese uses Chinese writing. The two readings of the same written character, one of Chinese origin and the other Japanese, carried out a constant operation of translation between writing and speech, and in this structure Lacan thought that the play of the unconscious, which psychoanalytic interpretation brings to light, had already settled into the everyday working of the language.1 Like many of Lacan’s provocative sentences, this one stands between a joke and a thesis. But it shows one thing clearly: for Lacan the formula “the unconscious is structured like a language” does not refer to an abstract structure realised in the same way in every language. Every analysis takes place in a particular language, within the sounds, homophones, grammar and writing of that language. The name Lacan gave this thought in his last years, lalangue, designates precisely the singularity of a language, its working not as a system but as a mass of sounds and meanings worked into a body.

In this respect, to translate Lacan into a language is not simply to transfer a conceptual vocabulary. The translator must either rebuild, in a language that does not carry them, the games Lacan built with the resources of French, its homophones, its word fusions, its grammatical distinctions, or accept their loss. There is loss in every translation. But where Lacan is concerned the loss touches the theory itself, since Lacan’s theory says that these resources of language, the very matter of the signifier, determine the structure of the subject. A language as grammatically distant from French as Turkish is therefore a testing ground for Lacan’s theory: which part of the theory depends on the particular structure of one language, French, and which part holds in every language?

II

The history of Lacan’s passage into Turkish begins just after his death. According to the bibliography compiled by Lacancı Psikanaliz Çalışmaları (Lacanian Psychoanalysis Studies), the first Lacan text translated into Turkish was the mirror stage paper, published in 1982 in the first issue of the series Felsefe Yazıları (Philosophical Writings), in a translation by Nilüfer Kuyaş.2 It was followed in 1994 by “The Signification of the Phallus”, translated by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Saffet Murat Tura. Tura’s Freud’dan Lacan’a Psikanaliz (Psychoanalysis from Freud to Lacan), published in 2005, was one of the first comprehensive works to introduce Lacan systematically to Turkish readers; Tura also became one of the editors of Ötekini Dinlemek (Listening to the Other), the psychoanalysis series of the Istanbul publisher Metis. In this series Lacan’s eleventh seminar, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, appeared in 2013 in Nilüfer Erdem’s translation; the twentieth, Encore, rendered as Yine / Hâlâ (“again / still”), in 2019 in Murat Erşen’s translation; and the second, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, in 2022 in Savaş Kılıç’s translation. The first seminar, Freud’s Papers on Technique, is reported to have been published by Encore Yayınları in 2024, in Ceylin Özcan’s translation.

Alongside this main line, smaller texts were translated in journals, special issues and online publications: the 2009 Lacan special issue of the journal MonoKL; Mon enseignement (2012) and Des Noms-du-Père (2014), translated by Murat Erşen; Télévision (2012), translated by Ahmet Soysal; Le triomphe de la religion (2015), translated by Deniz Kurt; two foundational texts from Écrits, the mirror stage paper and the Rome discourse, translated by the psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Mutluhan İzmir (2022); and many fragments online. But this picture also shows a gap clearly. As of 2026, four of Lacan’s twenty-seven seminars have been translated into Turkish as books, and there is no complete Turkish translation of Écrits. A Turkish reader of Lacan still reaches most of the foundational texts of his thought through another language, most often English.

Another feature of Lacan’s reception in Turkey is that it took place to a large extent at second hand, through the works of other thinkers. Slavoj Žižek’s books, beginning with The Sublime Object of Ideology, published by Metis in 2002 in Tuncay Birkan’s translation, reached a wide readership in Turkey and carried terms such as “the big Other”, “jouissance” and “objet petit a” into the language of political and cultural debate. In the same years books by Bruce Fink, Darian Leader, J.-D. Nasio and Élisabeth Roudinesco were translated, and Lacan’s theory was learned in university departments of psychology, literature, film and political science, often through these secondary sources. One consequence is that the separation I discussed in the essay “Lacan after Lacan” can be seen in Turkey too: the Lacan of philosophy and cultural criticism and the Lacan of the clinic have been learned from different books, different translations and different terms.

III

This difference is clearest in the terms. Turkish has no settled, generally accepted equivalents for Lacan’s basic concepts. Signifiant is rendered by gösteren (“that which shows”), which comes from the Turkish tradition of Saussurean linguistics; but some translators prefer imleyen (“that which marks”), to preserve Lacan’s emphasis that the signifier carries a trace, a mark, rather than pointing to a sign. Grand Autre is in most texts Büyük Öteki. On this site, however, Büyük Başka has been preferred: in Turkish öteki evokes the second of two, the other end of an imaginary reciprocity; başka evokes an otherness that has no counterpart, that does not enter into symmetry. The distinction Lacan draws between the small other (a) and the big Other (A), between the imaginary semblable and the symbolic order, may perhaps be carried better by the difference between these two Turkish words.3 The triad réel, symbolique, imaginaire is sometimes rendered Gerçek, Simgesel, İmgesel, sometimes Gerçek, Sembolik, Hayali. Jouissance, finally, is left untranslated in almost every translation, because none of the Turkish words keyif, haz or zevk carries the sense Lacan gives the term, of an excess beyond pleasure, interwoven with suffering.

In some cases translation inevitably loses a part of the theory. The title of Lacan’s seminar of 1973–1974, Les non-dupes errent, means “the non-duped err”; but read aloud in French it sounds the same as Les Noms-du-Père, the Names-of-the-Father. The homophony is a return to, and a joke on, the seminar on the Names-of-the-Father broken off ten years before; it says that those who are not duped by the Name-of-the-Father, who know it is a fiction and therefore think themselves free of it, lose their way precisely for that reason. In Turkish there is no sonic proximity between ad (name) and hayır (no) like that between nom and non; the formula can be conveyed only with a footnote. The limit the translator meets here is itself a lesson of Lacan’s theory: the play of the unconscious is bound to the matter of a particular language and passes from one language to another only with a loss.

IV

The question can also be asked the other way round: what does the structure of Turkish itself say to Lacan’s theory? The question has to be approached not as a linguist would, but as a clinician listening to Turkish-speaking subjects. A few examples show its range.

Turkish has no grammatical gender. The third-person singular pronoun, o, designates a woman, a man and a thing without distinction. One psychoanalytic consequence is that a Turkish speaker telling a dream or a memory can speak of a figure without specifying its sex. In analysis this indeterminacy at times becomes a question in its own right: when the analysand notices that he does not know who the o in his dream was, this not-knowing may be the trace of a censorship or of a desire. A decision that the grammar of a French- or English-speaking analysand forces him to make in every sentence, a Turkish-speaking analysand can defer. Does this support Lacan’s thesis that the formulas of sexuation are not bound to the grammar of a language, or does it strain it? The formulas define sex as a logical relation established with the structure of language, with the phallic function; but in a language whose grammar does not mark gender, this relation shows itself by other paths, in choices of words, in forms of address, in names.

Turkish also has no definite article. One of Lacan’s most quoted sentences, La femme n’existe pas, is built precisely on the article. Lacan crosses out the French definite article, the la; what he says is not that women do not exist, but that there is no category defining woman as a whole, as a universal. In Turkish the sentence Kadın yoktur does not carry the sense of universality the article bears; it sounds either like an absurd factual claim or like a vague generalisation. The Turkish translator is therefore forced to explain Lacan’s formula, to rewrite it, for instance, as “there is no universal called Woman”.4 But the same absence brings Turkish closer to another side of the theory. In Turkish a noun without an article can designate both a singular being and a kind; the passage between the universal and the singular is not marked in the grammar. The logic Lacan places on the feminine side, the “not-all”, the pas-tout, may find a counterpart precisely in this unmarkedness.

V

Perhaps the most striking feature of Turkish for psychoanalysis is its two forms of the past. Turkish makes a grammatical distinction between the suffix -dı, which reports an event as a directly witnessed fact, and the suffix -mış, which reports it as something heard from others, inferred afterwards, or noticed with surprise. The difference between geldi (“he came”, I saw it) and gelmiş (“he came”, it seems, I gather) lies not in the event itself but in the speaker’s relation to the event, to his own knowledge. Linguists call this structure evidentiality, and study Turkish as one of the classic examples of languages in which it is grammaticalised.5

Turkish speakers mostly narrate their dreams in this second mood: Rüyamda bir denizin kıyısındaymışım. Annem de oradaymış, ama yüzü başka biriymiş gibiymiş. “In my dream I was, it seems, on the shore of a sea. My mother was there too, it seems, but her face was, it seems, as if it were someone else’s.” The dreamer has lived the dream; yet in telling it he speaks to the self within the dream at a distance, as of something heard or noticed afterwards. This grammatical distance is a form, worked into the language itself, of what Freud saw in the telling of dreams: secondary revision, the shaping of the dream thoughts into a narratable form. The distinction Lacan draws between the statement (énoncé) and the enunciation (énonciation), between what is said and the subject’s way of saying it, is marked in Turkish by a suffix, within the sentence. The -mış shows that the subject of the enunciation cannot fully bear witness to what he says, that his knowledge is split by a gap.

Turkish fairy tales open in the same mood, with the formula I have taken as my epigraph: Bir varmış, bir yokmuş, “once there was, once there was not”. The formula says that something both was and was not, at once, without stumbling on a contradiction. In 1915 Freud wrote that the unconscious knows no contradiction, that there is no negation in it, that opposed instinctual impulses exist side by side in the unconscious without cancelling each other.6 The opening formula of the tale invites the listener precisely into this region, onto a stage where being and non-being do not exclude each other and events are told in the unwitnessed time of the -mış. To say that a language which every night tells its children tales beginning with this formula has set the law of the unconscious within its own moulds may be an exaggeration. But every psychoanalyst who hears the formula notices how close what Freud found stands to a set phrase of a language.

VI

What Lacan called lalangue is seen most concretely in a language’s homophones. Turkish is rich in this respect. Yüz means a face, the number one hundred, swimming and a surface; gül a rose and laughing; yaz summer and writing; dil the organ of speech and the language spoken; ben the first-person singular, “I”, and a mole on the skin. The last example is especially striking for a Lacanian ear: in Turkish, when one says “I”, one uses a word by which the language ties the speaker to a body, to a surface marked by a spot. If we recall that in the mirror stage Lacan defined the ego as a trace left by the image on the body, a foreign image, the homophony looks like more than a coincidence; but it is a coincidence too, and the work of psychoanalysis is precisely to listen to what meaning such coincidences take on in a subject’s life.

The double sense of dil is perhaps the point at which Turkish comes closest to Lacan’s theory. In French, too, langue designates both the organ and the language; Lacan’s lalangue draws on this double sense. In Turkish the expression ana dil, “mother tongue”, carries a bodily quality that the German Muttersprache lacks: the mother’s tongue is both the language she speaks and the organ in her mouth, the organ of nursing, of kissing, of first sounds. When Emine Sevgi Özdamar, a writer of Turkish origin living in Germany, gave her first book, published in 1990, the title Mutterzunge, “mother-tongue” in the bodily sense, she was trying to carry this bodily resonance into German.7 In working with analysands who live abroad, one often sees that the passage from one language to another, the fact that a word can be said only in Turkish, in the mother’s tongue, has to do with this bodily layer.

None of these examples shows that Turkish confirms or refutes Lacan’s theory. What they show is that the theory must be tested again in every language, and that such testing can enrich it. Lacan built his theory by listening to French-speaking analysands, within the resources of French; the homophones, grammatical gender and articles of French worked their way into his formulas. A clinic that listens to Turkish-speaking subjects must ask which part of these formulas is structural and which is particular to French. It is one of the questions Lacan studies have so far barely asked on a world scale.

VII

Lacan’s adventure in Turkish has been under way for more than forty years and is still at its beginning. Most of the seminars remain untranslated, no consensus has formed on the basic terms, and the Lacan of the clinic and that of the university speak separate languages. But this initial state also carries an advantage. In French and in English, Lacan’s terms have settled over decades, at times frozen, become a badge of belonging. In Turkish every term is still a decision; every translator, every writer, in carrying one of Lacan’s concepts into Turkish, must rethink what that concept means. This is what Lacan’s own teaching asks: to treat concepts not as a memorised vocabulary but as a question that must be built anew each time.

Perhaps the most important consequence of translating Lacan into Turkish is that it makes us look at Turkish itself anew. A Turkish speaker reading Lacan suddenly hears structures of his own language that go unnoticed in everyday speech: the distance of -mış, the genderlessness of o, the mole in ben, the indifference to contradiction of bir varmış bir yokmuş. Psychoanalysis begins when a subject hears his own speech, for the first time, as something foreign to him. The encounter between a language and a theory may also begin when the speakers of that language hear their own language, for the first time, as foreigners.

Notes

  1. J. Lacan, “Avis au lecteur japonais” (1972), Autres écrits, Paris: Seuil, 2001. Lacan’s interest in Japanese writing in these years is also evident in “Lituraterre” (1971) and in the eighteenth seminar. ↩︎
  2. Unless otherwise stated, the dates of translation and the names of translators in this section are based on the bibliography “Kitaplar” (Books) published on the website of Lacancı Psikanaliz Çalışmaları (lacancipsikanaliz.com). The dates of the Metis seminar translations have been checked against the publisher’s own catalogue. ↩︎
  3. On the Turkish pages of this site the small autre is therefore also rendered as küçük başka; see the essay “The Big Other”. In Lacan’s pair of concepts, the distinction between the lower-case autre (the mirror image, the semblable) and the capitalised Autre (the place of language, of the law, of the signifier) is made in French only by the capital letter. ↩︎
  4. This problem is discussed in detail in the essay “The Formulas of Sexuation” on this site. ↩︎
  5. Among the basic studies of evidentiality in Turkish see A. Aksu-Koç, The Acquisition of Aspect and Modality: The Case of Past Reference in Turkish, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988. For a recent comparison of the use of evidential forms in different written genres, including fables and dreams, see V. Simeonova and S. Arslan, “From Fables to Newspapers: Turkish and Bulgarian Evidentiality in Written Genres”, Balcania et Slavia, 5(1), 2025. ↩︎
  6. S. Freud, “Das Unbewußte” (1915), in particular the section “Die besonderen Eigenschaften des Systems Ubw”. On the function of negation as a way of bringing repressed content to consciousness, see S. Freud, “Die Verneinung” (1925). ↩︎
  7. On Özdamar and the mother tongue in exile, see the essay “Exile and the Mother Tongue” on this site and the page on Germany prepared for those living abroad. ↩︎

References

  • Aksu-Koç, A. (1988). The acquisition of aspect and modality: The case of past reference in Turkish. Cambridge University Press.
  • Freud, S. (1915). Das Unbewußte. Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse, 3.
  • Freud, S. (1925). Die Verneinung. Imago, 11.
  • Lacan, J. (2001). Avis au lecteur japonais. In Autres écrits. Seuil.
  • Lacan, J. (2013). Psikanalizin dört temel kavramı: Seminer 11. kitap (N. Erdem, Trans.). Metis.
  • Lacan, J. (2019). Yine / Hâlâ: Seminer 20. kitap (M. Erşen, Trans.). Metis.
  • Lacan, J. (2022). Freud’un teorisinde ve psikanalizin tekniğinde ben: Seminer 2. kitap (S. Kılıç, Trans.). Metis.
  • Lacancı Psikanaliz Çalışmaları. (n.d.). Kitaplar [Bibliography]. lacancipsikanaliz.com.
  • Simeonova, V., & Arslan, S. (2025). From fables to newspapers: Turkish and Bulgarian evidentiality in written genres. Balcania et Slavia, 5(1).
  • Tura, S. M. (2005). Freud’dan Lacan’a psikanaliz. Kanat Kitap.
  • Žižek, S. (2002). İdeolojinin yüce nesnesi (T. Birkan, Trans.). Metis.