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In 1982 Bettelheim wrote a long essay in the New Yorker examining the effect on psychoanalysis of Strachey's translation of Freud into English. A year later, he published an expanded version of it as Freud and Man's Soul. The effect, in Eckhardt's words (1985), was “a small shock-wave rippling through the psychoanalytic community” (p. 285).
What seismic statement caused such a reaction? Bettelheim dared to say that learning about Freud through the Standard Edition, for which Strachey was responsible, prevented people from understanding Freud.
To explore the significance of this declaration, I first review why Bettelheim undertook his mission and his arguments for it. After then taking into account other commentators on the Standard Edition, I consider the intriguing evidence about Freud's acceptance of Strachey's translations. Next I present an overview of the literature on the topic since Bettelheim's book. Finally, I take note that the urge for humanism in psychotherapy has bypassed the rigidities of the Standard Edition in the fashionable thinking of today. Yet, Bettelheim's points remain valuable, not only for reasons of historical clarity, but because those rigidities may still put people off and thus stand in the way of an integrated view of personality that Bettelheim felt he got from Freud.
Bettelheim believed strongly that the character of the Standard Edition interfered with understanding Freud because the staff members at the Orthogenic School (where he was director) were well read in Freud and yet:
The considerable theoretical understanding of unconscious processes which they had acquired from studying Freud remained exactly that:
Page 469theoretical. It was of little use in helping children afflicted by severe psychiatric disorders; often it was even an impediment. It was a reasoned-out, emotionally distant understanding. What was needed was emotional closeness based on an immediate sympathetic comprehension of all aspects of the child's soul—of what afflicted it