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Bruno Bettelheim, Professor Emeritus of education, psychology and psychiatry at the University of Chicago, will be known to readers of this Journal as the author of several important books such as Children of the Dream and The Empty Fortress. In this, his latest book, the author severely criticises the English translation of Freud's complete works in the Standard Edition. He states (in the preface) that ‘the English translations of Freud's writings are seriously defective … and have led to erroneous conclusions, not only about Freud the man but also about psychoanalysis’.
Translating any text constitutes a formidable problem and can never be fully satisfactory. Unlike music, which is a universal language, words are metaphors and approximations which evoke in the reader associations and overtones that pertain to his particular language and culture. Hence it is often impossible to find words with identical meanings in two different languages. Freud himself, in his Thirty-fifth Introductory Lecture, uses the English term, ‘begging the question’ adding, ‘I do not know a good expression for this in German’. Also Bettelheim admits (p. 44) that ‘a type of expression that in English would be scorned as muddle-headed and confused is quite acceptable in German’. He seems to be unaware of the fact that even in his native German a word can have different overtones of meaning, depending on the regional pronunciation. He, like Freud, grew up in Vienna. In Austrian German the word for psychoanalysis has the stress on psyche (Psymacrchoanalyse), whereas in standard German (as in English) the stress is on analysis (Psymacrchoanalyse). Yet Bettelheim objects to the English word ‘psychoanalysis’. He thinks that the stress on analysis emphasises ‘the part of the word whose connotations are scientific’ instead of ‘Freud's emphasis on the soul’ (p. 12). Unlike L. Stein, who argued that analytical psychology is a ‘modern science comparable to physics’ (STEIN 1), Bettelheim thinks that psyc