Translator's Note

In terms of psychoanalytic vocabulary, the author generally adopts what have become the accepted French translations of Freud's German: ça for Es, investissement for Besetzung, acte manqué for Fehlleistung, etc. In every case these are literal translations of Freud's ‘everyday’ German, and preferable by far to Strachey's pseudo-scientific, often preposterous Graeco-Latinisms (id, cathexis, parapraxis). The modern ‘lay’ reader, almost certainly lacking Strachey's classical education, may well be perplexed by such terms, but, for the English-speaking psychoanalytic ‘clerisy’, they have become technical terms and to change them at this late stage would obscure rather than clarify. It does not, in any case, fall within the jurisdiction of a humble translator of the secondary Freudian literature to make such radical changes. I have therefore employed the usual Stracheyan vocabulary, while adopting one departure from it that has become commonplace, the use of ‘drive’ to render pulsion, Freud's Trieb, which, under ‘instinct’, Strachey conflated with Freud's Instinkt. In one important case, however, Piera Aulagnier departed from the usual French practice and rendered Freud's Ich, not as le moi, but as le Je (capitalised, which is not the practice in French). This term, clearly central to her thinking, has been translated here as ‘the I’—and given neuter gender.

In the company of many French analysts of the past half century, Piera Aulagnier adopted, directly or through the work of Jacques Lacan, terms deriving from structural linguistics (sign, signifier, signified, referent, etc.). She also uses, almost unthinkingly, certainly without any particular axe to grind, terms that Lacan made much of ‘Metonymy’ (a figure of speech by which the name of one thing is used instead of another related to it, as in ‘He's taken to the bottle’) is often used here, but without its explicit Lacanian contradistinction with metaphor. Similarly, jouissance is used without its Lacanian contradist