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The Mark Solms-helmed Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (RSE; Freud, 2024) is a major occasion for our field. While Solms retains almost all of Strachey's original translations, a significant new introduction and a remarkably thorough glossary of terms (complete with each term's histories in German and English and the ways different translators have taken on the words or phrases) provide invaluable scholarly context into the scientific and literary discourses of both Freud and his major translators. What emerges is unexpected, an RSE that, despite being almost word for word the same as its predecessor, reads very differently. Solms and his collaborators argue that Strachey's Standard Edition (SE), far from being the arbitrary and scientistic mistranslation it is often caricatured as, is a series of compromises that emerge from a profound wrestling with Freud's texts and with the traditions of German to English translations. This article seeks to summarize and draw out Solms's argument, while showing some of the ways that the RSE reads differently from the SE, and how the Freud that emerges in the RSE is subtly but radically different from the Freud in the SE.
There is no such thing as a new translation of Freud without controversy. From Brill, to the pre-Standard Edition era of many translators, to the Standard Edition, to the Adam Phillips-helmed Penguin Editions, each new translation is at least in part a rebuke of the previous one, and each new edition is a new Freud, drawn in the translator's image. And because psychoanalysts, whatever their institute and theory, must ultimately appeal to Freud's authority, each new translation must be greeted with anxious enthusiasm and curiosity, as well as an outpouring of critiques from everyone who appeals to a different Freud than the one found in the translation. Since there is no translation, perhaps in any language, with the reach and influence of the SE, no translation's short