When Freud saw the sea, published in French in 1988, it is the testimony of a voyage or, rather, of a swing, a movement of coming and going, that, instead of settling in one of the languages ​​through which it transits - dwell in it, as some would say - is held in suspense, pending, freely floating, freischwebend.
 When Freud saw the sea, he examines the scene of the discovery of the unconscious, which rather than correspond to a single instant, which can be cut and isolated clearly in the history of thought, is a mixture of autobiography, theoretical novel, poetic essay, and philological inquiry. an overdetermined, tangled scene, whose decipherment is a challenge and a perennial task. The German language, its particular configuration and dynamics, its rules and combinations, on the one hand, and Freud's relation to it, a relationship at the same time erudite and loving, on the other, would be two of the necessary ingredients to explain that conjunction fertile, which would be translated into the birth of psychoanalytic discourse - and in its survival. The text does not propose the superiority, hegemony or precedence of one language over another, but it urges a comparative reading of how Freud's thought materializes in different languages ​​and what effects this would have for epistemology, the status of concepts, relationship with other discursive practices and the clinical of psychoanalysis.