Preface

In 1948, the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, London, and The Hogarth Press set out to realize a project which seemed to them of the utmost importance for the furtherance of psycho-analysis in the English-speaking world. This project was to publish a newly translated and fully edited Standard Edition of the complete psychological writings of Sigmund Freud. But even after James Strachey had made himself available as Editor and chief Translator, the difficulties to be surmounted were still formidable. They consisted in part of the large amount of money needed, and for another part of the wide scatter of copyright invested in a large number of individuals and publishers owing to the author's generous disregard when permitting earlier publications in the English language. In due course, money worries were removed by the efforts of Dr. John Murray of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Dr. William Menninger, President of the American Psychoanalytic Association; the complex questions concerning copyright were finally solved by my brother, Ernst Freud, then Director of Sigmund Freud Copyrights.

Although James Strachey in his General Preface to Volume I paid tribute to all three, as well as to those who assisted him in his translation work (his wife, myself, Dr. Alan Tyson, Miss Angela Richards), it was left to those who came after him to pay tribute to Strachey himself. No translator of similar qualifications could have been found for his work, nor could anybody else have pursued it with the same scholarly precision, understanding and indefatigable determination through personal handicap up to his death.

It is perhaps the highest praise for Strachey's achievement that for a large part of the world's reading public the Standard Edition, with its lucid editorial comments, entered into surprising competition with the author's original text.

Anna Freud

London, July 1974