The Freud Klein Controversies

Dear Sir,

I wonder if I could correct some of the statements made by Dr Gillespie in his very nice review of The Freud Klein Controversies (1941-45), published by Tavistock and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in 1990, and edited by Pearl King and myself. The review was published in Volume 73, Part 1 of this journal on pages 161-64.

On page 164 Dr Gillespie writes 'The only adverse criticism of this book refers to proofreading. There are too many misprints, though hardly any in the editorial contributions; I suspect therefore the bulk of the book was copied without editing from the archival documents'.

I completely agree with Dr Gillespie's criticism and I would add that it is overall in the text of the Scientific Discussions that one can find the misprints. I would like to stress that as editor of the section concerning the Scientific Discussions I made it quite clear to those concerned with the actual publication of the book that I would only proof-read my Editorial Comments and the passages from Freud's Standard Edition which I added to the Discussions. I do not think it worthwhile to explain the various reasons which led me to take this position.

My requirement was accepted by the publishers.

Dr Gillespie would also have preferred that I should have quoted the original German text rather than that of the Standard Edition, because of the problems related to Strachey's translation. While I understand the phiological scruples of Dr Gillespie, I would like to remind the reader that during the Scientific Discussions Freud was quoted in English except in a few minor cases where the discussion tried to clarify the meaning of some expressions which had not been properly translated.

To quote all the passages in German would have created enormous additional editorial problems and, as Dr Gillespie knows, even the original German text of Freud has its own problems.

One should not forget also that only a limited number of psychoanalysts, if one excepts the German-speaking So