You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Editing a book is a notoriously tricky exercise. Reworking 24 volumes for a revision of the already-existing standard edition of the complete works of one of the most influential authors—all the while an entire discipline is breathing down your neck—is an astounding feat. For this alone, Mark Solms deserves applause. Clarifying textual changes and debates while revisiting the classic sites of “error” of the Strachey translation is no less welcome to those “outsiders,” like me, who study and teach the psychoanalytic tradition.
By contemporary editorial standards, Solms's cautious approach toward retranslating—his preference for limiting the rework to a minimum—is unusual and surprising, but it has its reasons. It
enables a fairly straightforward concordance between the Revised Standard Edition and Strachey's Standard Edition.1 It also is noticeably risk-averse, for example in “The Ego and the Id” (RSE, 19), where the editor might have decided finally to be done with the ego and id language and tried out using the actual terms, the I and the it.2 Or Beyond the Pleasure Principle (RSE, 18), where the editor corrects instinct to drive but does not, for example, include (or take seriously) the philological research carried out by Ulrike May and Michael Schröter (2013). Their exceptional study and editorial work are cited only in the German version (RSE, 18, p. 13), but Solms could and I think should have used them; the new English translation and critical edition that May and Schröter prepared of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (2015) is not even mentioned. This absence leads me to think that more studies that should have been taken into consideration for the RSE have been ignored. In this same vein, of suspicious worry: why is Freud's “Critical Introduction to Neuropathology” (1887/2012) not included or even mentioned in the RSE? Why, more broadly speaking, is the entire RSE more interested in the history of the translations of the terms offered over time rather than in