Introduction to Gampel and Puget

There are many good reasons for deciding to publish the translation into English of two psychoanalytic works on 'social subjectivity' or 'social pain'. The first reason, as is customary for our Journal, is the interest and originality of the papers; secondly, the complexity of a topic that invites reflection; thirdly, and not lastly, their relevance to the present time. This relevance corresponds, unfortunately, to the many examples that trigger social pain today: from wars to dictatorships, from forced migrations to the state of our planet, from inequality to epidemics.

These two texts were published in Spanish in the journal 'Psicoanálisis' of the Asociación Psicoanalítica de Buenos Aires, vol.XXIV, n ° 1/2, 2002.

Yolanda Gampel's work: "El dolor de lo social" (The pain of the social) begins with a quotation from Freud's book "Civilization and its Discontents" ("Das Unbehagen in der Kultur") of 1930. As James Strachey points out in the Editor's Introduction the word 'Unbehagen' was not the first title Freud chose for the book. It was "Das Unglück in der Kultur", that is "Unhappiness in Civilization". Strachey says it was difficult to find an English equivalent for the word 'Unbehagen' (discomfort, uneasiness) and that Mrs Riviere's choice of 'discontents' was the ideal solution. The difficulty of finding a correct equivalent is certainly not unknown to translators, but it would seem that the title of this book presents a particular difficulty which also extends to the German word Kultur, 'Civilization' in the English translation, 'Cultura', 'El malestar en la cultura’ in the Spanish translation, ‘Malaise dans la civilization’ in French, ‘Il Disagio della civiltà’ in Italian. Perhaps some of the complexities of the topic itself are evident in the translations of the title, but I will not dwell on this issue.

The quotation in question, reproduced here, is preceded in Freud's text by a reflection and a reference to Goethe on the fact that happiness is only an episodic p