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The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud is a carefully annotated and reworked successor of the by now quite familiar Standard Edition, originally published between 1953 and 1974 by Hogarth Press. Almost immediately after its release, many a critical voice was raised to protest James Strachey's approach to the English translation—from the use of Greco-Latin neologisms to the addition of technical jargon in place of what might at first glance seem like more ordinary terms in German. In responses to these and other criticisms, the “intellectual custodian” of the Standard Edition and its copublisher, the Institute of Psychoanalysis in London, called for a symposium on the topic in 1989, and the undertaking of a Revised Standard Edition was formally announced shortly after. The late Albert Dickson and then Mark Solms took up the directorship and, along with an appointed committee, released the revised edition in 24 volumes nearly three decades later, including an e-book version. This is clearly the product not only of many years of dedicated close readings, word-by-word analyses, and revised bibliographic and notational commentaries but also of extensive engagement with previous editions and notes and their many authors, translators, commentators, and critics. The Revised Standard Edition also includes new Freud material (56 notes, essays, and letters) and new photographic material; moreover, in Volumes 1 to 23, all the new additions—from full-length texts to the updated spellings of words, the addition of marginalia, and even changes in pagination or fonts—are lightly underscored in the electronic and printed text, making them clearly distinguishable.
Much of the novelty of the Revised Standard Edition is mapped out in the first and last volumes, the focus of this review. The first includes all of the prepsychoanalytic papers contained in the Standard Edition along with two newly translated reviews and a lecture
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