Process or Structure?

In a recently published monograph Arlow and Brenner1 compare Freud's topographic and structural theories, find them incompatible with each other and argue in favor of abandoning the earlier theory for the later one. They state that “the therapeutic task in the topographic sense is to make the unconscious conscious” (p. 53) whereas the goal under the structural theory is “Where id was, there shall ego be” (p. 54). The goal of therapy thus seems to become that of replacing one structure by another, of revolution rather than evolution, of exchange instead of growth. The mechanic rather than dynamic quality in this therapeutic goal is due to the mistranslation of this frequently quoted, central statement by Freud.4

As I discussed in an earlier paper,2 Freud's English translators have rather consistently replaced affect-laden German terms by neutral English words and dynamic, active constructions by static, passive ones. In this way, something Freud described as a process became in the English translation a structure. This neutralization and solidification of Freud's central concepts in English has contributed to the tendency to reify them.

Correctly translated, Freud's famous statement reads: Where It was, I ought to become. ‘Becoming’ is identical with growing and maturing as used by G. W. Allport for the title of his book on personality development and as it appears in Pindar's adage “Become what thou art!” Nietzsche, who frequently quoted the Pindar maxim, subtitled his last work, Ecce Homo,5 “How One Becomes What One Is.” He describes the process in the chapter “Why I Am So Intelligent” as follows: