James Strachey stands between his reader and Freud precisely because he translated and organized Freud's life work. Therefore we need to know what Strachey took for granted and how he made his choices in order to begin to disentangle Strachey's views from Freud's.

Freud had no fear of sounding disorderly when describing what he could not see and did not understand. In fact, he was trying to reveal the faults in his own ideas by putting them as clearly as he could. Freud also began to develop intricate and nonspatial conceptions, but even these more abstract ways of thinking about unconscious activity are usually laid out in plain German.