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There is more than one reason to return to Freud. Lacan returned to Freud in order to “find” his own ideas in the Freud texts, with a project of reinterpretation. There is currently a turning back to the Freud texts among Latin American analysts as part of an effort to test Kleinian “colonization” and to search out the authentic, clinical roots of their psychoanalytic ideas. Grubrich-Simitis has returned to the Freud texts as a scholar, as an old friend long acquainted with these texts as a result of many years of scholarly work with them, seeking out principles for a comprehensive, authoritative, scholarly edition of the corpus as the basis of future editions or translations.
Grubrich-Simitis acknowledges from the outset the scale and quality of the work done by Strachey for the English Standard Edition. She is unimpressed by facile enthusiasm for a new translation in English, with its expectation that it will correct and deepen our understanding of Freud's articulation of psychoanalysis; she also questions the criticisms of Strachey's work on which this naive hope is based. I find myself in agreement with her assessment of Strachey's contribution. I have yet to hear an enthusiast for a new English translation identify one theoretical proposition, one technical recommendation, or one clinical description about which we have been misled by Strachey, in a way that would make a real difference to our understanding of psychoanalysis. The style or metaphorical nuance may change but there is, thus far, no evidence that the propositional content of psychoanalysis will be substantially improved by a new translation.