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On hearing about the imminent publication of the Freud Revised Standard Edition, I immediately thought that the International Journal of Pyschoanalysis should mark this event which is bound to have special significance for the entire worldwide psychoanalytic community. I am aware, often painfully, of psychoanalysis becoming diffracted into so many different languages and discourses that the benefits of plurality can sometimes seem to become undermined by too much diversity. Might there be a single, unifying factor which joins together all these very different psychoanalysts and their conflicting theories?
The basic answer to this dilemma is the work of Freud. That surely is one element shared in common by all psychoanalysts. Psychoanalysts interpret Freud in radically different ways, but the basic texts of Freud are shared among us all. And, as we well know, there are an extraordinarily large number of those basic texts, since our founder thought and wrote copiously for so many years and on so great a number of different topics. In fact, you could say that the problem of psychoanalytic diversity starts within the ideas of Freud himself, since he not only had so many ideas, but his ideas were always developing and changing.
The next problem, however, is that Freud wrote in German, a language most analysts do not speak or read. It is for this reason that the translation of Freud into the almost universal language of English is of such paramount importance. Already the principle of a basic, unifying text begins to become more diffuse precisely because the text which most analysts use as “basic” is not actually Freud’s own original German text, but a translation.
And it is not any translation, but “the” translation. At this point we turn to the historians, who tell the completely fascinating human story of Freud’s early translators into English – A.A. Brill, Joan Riviere, Ernest Jones, Alix and James Strachey – leading to the monumental achievement of the Standard Edition.