Fragments Towards the Natal

Abstract

The author carries out a psychoanalytical journey that leads to various constructions concerning origins and identity. Together with contributions from History, Literature and Philosophy, he questions the natal origins. The articulation of language and place is worked out from the “unheimlich” text of Freud. The mother is instituted as the “first speaking residence”. Love for the natal origins and its deadly outbursts are widely dealt with and illustrated from Heidegger’s work. Working with exiled patients enriches this point of view, where language –the subjective identity’s essence, its “safeguard”– is experienced as a loss and, in this sense, is a metaphor of the psychic castration anxiety. The author proposes the possibility of translation as a condition of language itself, and so states the hypothesis that a kind of primitive possibility of translation would be at the origin of languages. This model of translation then would make possible to overcome the contradiction in terms, of both tendencies: love for one’s own or natal origins, and what’s different, cosmopolitan.