You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Luiz Hanns directs his work to two kinds of Freud scholars. The first, those not knowing German, will have access to a layer of Freud's text that is not normally found in translations. The second type of reader may know enough German to understand the meaning of the original but will not be aware of the associations that the central terms of each phrase will have for the native speaker.
Hanns, who is a Germanist and psychoanalyst, has published an outstanding work. The Dictionary presents and discusses some of the most difficult psychoanalytical terms. Translation problems presented by those terms are common for several Latin languages (French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) as well as for English psychoanalytical language in which Greek and Latin terms are frequently employed. In the original Brazilian edition each German term is compared with the standard Brazilian translations. A Spanish edition will be published during the first part of 1999, in which each German term will be compared to the usual Spanish translations. An English version will also be prepared.
Hanns chose forty important theoretical and psychoanalytical terms, and the book consists of a detailed commentary on each of them (Angst, Abwehr, Bearbeitung, Einfall, Darstellen, etc., to Trieb and Übertragung). Each entry has six sections: (1) the term in German; (2) its etymology and correlated terms; (3) a comparison with the term in Portuguese,3 (4) examples of Freud's use of this term; (5) additional commentaries. This form of procedure is based on a principle that is taken from linguistics: that a specific German word has only an approximate correspondence to its equivalent in other languages. There is a common semantic nucleus, but the German term may have connotations that are not present in Portuguese, while the Portuguese word may also have additional meanings that are absent from its German equivalent.
One example will clarify the value of this method: that of the term Besetzung (investment or