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There can be no doubt that after 30 years of painstaking work, the appearance of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (RSE), edited by Mark Solms, is a scholarly event of seismic proportions. Within the psychoanalytic community, the RSE surely ranks as the most significant contribution to English language Freud scholarship so far in the twenty-first century. The importance of this new edition is, however, not limited to psychoanalysis, as its impact will reverberate across all areas of research and debate that Freud's work has already so significantly informed and influenced for well over a century. While generations of English language readers have mainly come to know Freud through James Strachey's consummate, if controversial translation, those engaging with Freud's thought will now also do so through Solms' revised translation and the enhanced and updated editorial apparatus that scaffolds it.
Given the significance of what the publication of the RSE means, it is therefore important that some of the implications of the editorial decisions shaping it are indicated, a task I will devote most of this review to. Before doing so, however, readers of the British Journal of Psychotherapy will want some sense of what, exactly, has changed from Strachey's original translation. The first and perhaps principal point to note is given in the title: this is a revised rather than a new translation. As Solms writes in the ‘Preface to the Revised Edition’: ‘The reasoning behind [the] decision’, to revise Strachey's translation rather than to translate Freud anew, ‘revolved mainly around questions of convention, but also the special problems of psychoanalytic terminology, and the limitations of translation itself’ (Solms, RSE 1, p. 59). When translating Freud, Solms reminds us that Strachey opted for the strategy of treating him as if he were an ‘Englishman of science’. The rationale for this is the mutually exclusive choice facing the t