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.
The cultural creativity of a small country and a linguistic region are, to an extent that is not generally recognized, dependent on translations that can be carried out there. What would the Swedish-speaking cultural sphere amount to without Carl august Hagberg's and Erland lagerlöf's interpretations of Shakespeare and Homer, respectively, or without Erland lidforss's translations of Dante and Cervantes, or Emil Zilliacus's rendering of classical Greek poetry and drama in Swedish?
In the past year, the 11th volume of a new, authorized Swedish translation of Sigmund Freud's collected writings was published; the final, index volume of this edition is forthcoming in the autumn of 2008. For Freud and for Swedish-speaking readers interested in psychology, the publishing house Natur och Kultur has played a rôle similar to that of the Bonnier publishing group when it commissioned the translation by Gunnel Vallquist of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, between 1964 and 1982. While Clarence Crafoord, Bengt Warren, and the late Lars Sjögren have been the general editors of the new Freud edition, the responsibility for each volume has rested with a near-dozen other, prominent Swedish psychoanalysts.
From my subjective point of view, the 11th volume — the penultimate one — includes many of Freud's most important texts. I would rank it as the third most important among the 12 volumes of the complete series, following Drömtydning [the interpretation of dreams] (vol. Ii, ed. András Pöstenyi) and Föreläsningar: Orientering I psykoanalys [introductory lectures on psycho-analysis and New introductory lectures on psycho-analysis] (vol. I, ed. David titelman), that is to say, if it is at all meaningful to rank the works of a culturally transforming and therefore continuously contested oeuvre such as Freud's.
The volume considered here, whose subtitle is art and literature [Konst och litteratur], includes the essays and shorter papers in which Freud, finding support in his self-analy