Freud Chinese Translation Project (FCTP)

For the first time, a Chinese translation of the Freud Lectures is now available, which was produced in cooperation between German-speaking psychoanalysts, sinologists, and Chinese native speakers as translators. The result is a technically and linguistically verified translation, which is all the more noteworthy as there have been several Chinese translations of the Freud Lectures so far, which are secondary translations from English and have not been checked for their psychoanalytical appropriateness. The translation now produced is the result of the Freud Chinese Translation Project (FCTP) at the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt (Germany).

The starting point for the attempt at a Chinese Freud translation was the experience of the German-Chinese psychotherapy course in Shanghai (Zhong De Ban) founded by Alf Gerlach (Simon et al., 2011), in which I participated as a lecturer for several years. It quickly became clear that there were a number of translated texts by Freud in China, but almost exclusively from English. This gave rise to the idea of a pilot project to investigate the problems of translating Freud's lectures from the German original and to create a standard for further translations of Freud's works.

The lectures are available in three versions in the German-speaking world: firstly, in the Gesammelte Werke, a simple reading edition without further commentaries. The second is the Studienausgabe, including a German translation of the editorial apparatus of the English Standard Edition. The third German version published from 2015 in the Sigmund Freud Gesamtausgabe, edited by Christfried Tögel, contains all of Freud's writings intended for print—including his pre-analytical works. All three Freud editions do not represent a comprehensive historical-critical edition; that would be the complete Freud texts accompanied by documents on the history of their creation, with text-critical comments and explanations. A pr