Mythology—The Self—Peer Gynt

When it comes to tangible, measurable items, words are usually wonderfully precise. Thus, when we speak of a stone, a rose, a dog, a mountain, or a typewriter, most people will know what we refer to, and these words can be easily translated into other languages. Yet, when it comes to words referring to items that we cannot touch, measure, or weigh, such as love, soul, anxiety, hate, freedom, ego, and depression, this is no longer the case, and misunderstandings are common.

I'm reminded of one of Bruno Bettelheim's last books, Freud and Man's Soul, in which he points out that translating with psyche Freud's German term, Seele, has led to fundamental misunderstandings of psychoanalysis in the English-speaking world.

The term anxiety may refer to a positive emotion when it is used in a phrase such as, “I'm anxious to see tonight's play,” to a realistic negative feeling, in a phrase such as, “I'm anxious about the risk of war,” or to a pathologic state in a phrase such as, “I'm always anxious when I give a talk.”

Similarly, one person may designate with hate a somewhat negative feeling that is experienced as reasonably normal, such as implied in “I hate broccoli!”; another may designate a strong dislike or aversion associated with some guilt, while yet another will view it as a completely taboo feeling that implies the intent to commit murder.

Love is yet another term experienced differently by different persons in different cultures and in different situations. A remarkable example is the gospel of John which—as others and myself have shown—clearly fails to give its main message in its Latin and modern translations that find themselves forced to use the same word for the original Greek terms Agape and phile. Thereby some crucial passages become not only meaningless, but also somewhat comical.

Worst of all, maybe, is the expression self, which even in our everyday