A number of historical studies have recently been added to the literature on translation across cultures. Relying on earlier considerations of the problematics of translation by philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Alasdair MacIntyre and others, these studies focus on translation not simply as a word-for-word rendition between different languages, but rather as a process of interpretation/transformation between different cultures and historical conditions. Such studies consequently draw our attention to a multilayered formation of translation—a process, in other words, that unfolds historically, and involves converging and dispersing meanings, structures, intentions, and predicaments between languages—while at the same time tracing the effects of power relations, including those produced and resisted under colonialism. Drawing on this literature, this paper will examine the work of Izzettin Sadan, the first, albeit self-trained, psychoanalyst in Turkey. Trained as a neuropsychiatrist in Turkey and France, Sadan later turned into psychoanalysis, a novel Western discourse, which he wanted to disseminate in Turkey. Through his translations of the works and arguments of Sigmund Freud, Ernest Jones, and others, he attempted to produce a psychoanalytic canon in Turkish—a canon that was bound to be different in form and practice as it filtered through the cultural and socio-political structures of the early Turkish republic. As I will argue in this paper, Sadanian psychoanalysis through this process of translation emerged to symbolically represent a resistance to, if not a break from, some features of European (Freudian) psychoanalytic discourse, including those that relate to society and civilization as well as some of the foundational concepts of psychoanalysis such as the sex drive (Eros). In sum, through a close reading of Sadan’s writings, this paper will demonstrate how the translation of psychoanalysis into Turkish involved in the process its reconfiguration to accommodate not only the Turkish “space of experience” but also the early Turkish Republic’s “horizon of expectations.”