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Ernest Jones wrote in his autobiography: "… the translations in question were not only seriously inaccurate, with misunderstandings of the German text and ambiguous renderings that greatly impaired their value for scientific purposes, but were unworthy of Freud's style and gave a misleading impression of his personality" (11). Other psychoanalytic writers have complained about specific English psychoanalytic terms which do not render the German idea adequately. Thus, e.g., Eduardo Weiss remarked: "Freud's term … conveys a clear figurative representation … which has unfortunately been lost in the English translation" (16, p. 188).
Freud who "had a reputation as a master of German prose so high that he was even awarded the Goethe Prize at Frankfurt for his literary merits" (11) was extremely language conscious as evidenced by his Psychopathology in Everyday Life, his Interpretation of Dreams, and his use of free association. He had a good command of Latin and Greek and lived in Austria where words derived from the classical languages are used more frequently than in Prussia. He made use of such words (e.g., Penis, Telepathie) in many instances. Hence it may be assumed that whenever Freud used a common German word to name some psychological concept he was fully aware of all the connotations of that word and wanted its "affective elements, " as Bally (1) calls them, to enter into his use of the term. He must also have been aware of the fact that a common German word contains and conveys much more emotional immediacy than a new one formed or taken from a dead language.
Jones claimed that the first of "the advantages of the classical