This paper suggests that the efforts of James and Alix Strachey to establish an equivalence of Freud's German works in English, while notably successful at many levels, were bound to fail when it came to the rendering of Freud's characteristic style. Moreover, the attempt at an imaginative approximation of Freud to the nineteenth-century English man of science ran counter to the distinctively Austrian social, educational, medical and ethnic situation which constituted the contemporary scientific paradigm as Freud experienced it, and which it was his achievement to overcome.