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As I explain in my Preface to the Revised Standard Edition: when the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London (the custodians of the Standard Edition) decided in 1989 to produce a revised version of it – in the wake of an international conference that they held on the topic – criticism of Strachey’s translation had reached fever pitch.
The Institute appointed a committee to oversee the project, under the chairmanship of Clifford Yorke, who was Anna Freud’s chosen successor when she retired from the Hampstead Clinic and who was the last editor of the International Psychoanalytical Library – which had been established in the 1920s by Ernest Jones, with the express purpose of disseminating Freud’s work in English, following the collapse of German and Austro-Hungarian hegemony at the end of the First World War. Other prominent members of the committee were Joseph Sandler, Pearl King and Riccardo Steiner. The fact that this committee appointed Albert Dickson to be the editor of the RSE indicates how modest the revisions were that they envisaged initially. Although Dickson assisted Angela Richards when she edited volume 24 of the SE, following Strachey’s death, he could not be described as a Freud scholar or translator. He was a copy-editor, albeit a very good one, who was known to Sandler by dint of the fact that he compiled the annual indexes of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis when Sandler was its editor.
The role assigned to me initially was likewise limited: to translate a few of Freud’s papers that they wanted to add to the RSE, such as some early lectures by him on hysteria, obsessional neurosis and phobia, his case-report on “Nina R”, an account of his own typical dreams, and some letters from him to Einstein and others. Dickson was asked also to include my translations of a few insignificant psychological papers by Freud that I had come across during my efforts to prepare his Complete Neuroscientific Works for publication. It is noteworthy that the Editor’s