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.
DEAR DR HAYLEY,
I am writing in connection with the editorial by Malcolm Pines in the International Journal about the revision of the Standard Edition. Recently, I made a careful study, in The Interpretation of Dreams, of the 'short innocent dream' (S.E. Vol. IV, p. 186): 'He dreamt that he was putting on his winter overcoat once more, which was a dreadful thing'. Through a series of the patient's associations, Freud interprets the overcoat as symbolizing a condom, of which a light one is dangerous but a thick one is bad.
I was surprised to discover that the Strachey translation of this passage omits an entire clause from a sentence. The penultimate sentence of Freud's discussion reads, in Strachey's translation: 'The condom was suitably represented as an overcoat, since one slips into both of them'. The original German reads: 'Der Kondom ist der "berzieher" mit recht, man zieht ihn ja über; so heisst man auch einen leichten Rock'. The italics are mine; they are the words omitted by Strachey. The translation might be amended as follows: 'The condom is rightly a pull-over, an berzieher [in German], since one actually pulls it over; berzieher is also the [German] word for a light coat'.
The Strachey translation reads very smoothly, probably more so than my alternative. But it sacrifices the wordplay on berzieher and its significance for the dream thought about thick and thin condoms, symbolized by the heavy overcoat and the light one. Although I believe Strachey's translation to be too good from a literary standpoint to be entirely replaced, I believe it should be checked over and corrected for such omissions and distortions.
Yours sincerely,