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‘Nothing can replace Strachey's The Interpretation of Dreams, just as nothing will replace the Authorized Version. It is quite simply THERE’. So says Crick in her ‘Notes on the Translation’ (1999, p. xli). Quite so. But here the biblical comparison ends. We shall see that the intention behind Crick's new translation bears no similarity with, in this instance, the new translation that became ‘The New English Bible’ (1970, p. v) that was written to render the Bible from the original tongues into contemporary idiom. Unlike Strachey's translation Crick's has not been written to become THE standard work.
Today nearly all English psychoanalytical references are made to ‘Strachey's Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud’ simply referred to as the ‘SE’, that was first published by Hogarth Press in 1953, now in its eighth edition. The present translation of Die Traumdeutung is based on Freud's first edition (1900). There have of course been a number of translations prior to Strachey's and we learn that a Revised Standard Edition is due to be published this year. To start with, the present translation has the great advantage of appearing in one volume as compared with the two of the SE (vols. IV & V). Among the many interesting facts packed into the 46 pages that precede Crick's text we find that she is a Germanist and does not write from inside the profession. She hopes that she has translated with an ear for the literary and cultural resonances of Freud's German. That hope is, in my opinion, splendidly justified by the work. It does indeed make Freud's epoch-making book accessible to the lay reader who has not got to ‘enter the arcanum of a specialized terminology’ (p. xli), as is the case with Strachey's Greek and Latin-based neologisms, now as deeply embedded in English psychoanalytic terminology, e.g. ‘cathexis’. Let us take ‘Our Father which art in Heaven’ as it appeared in the Book of Common Prayer . ‘Which’ only became ‘who’ in the Book o