The light blue dust covers of the Standard Edition all look alike: the typeface and format are similar, only the details of contents vary. Under Sigmund Freud's large name, on each volume is written, “Translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey, In Collaboration with Anna Freud, Assisted by Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson.” James Strachey is still well known for his article about the “mutative interpretation.” Anna Freud is familiar. Alix Strachey is James' wife and correspondent whose letters of 1924–25 are collected in a book called Bloomsbury/Freud. That leaves Alan Tyson: unlike the others, I had encountered him nowhere else.
Who is Alan Tyson?
I began to investigate, initially hoping to recruit him as a visiting speaker for our Cleveland Psychoanalytic Society. My first hunch proved wrong but helpful: Robert Tyson from San Diego was not related. But serendipitously, he knew Alan Tyson and provided me a London phone number. I soon had the pleasure of speaking with Alan Tyson himself on the phone, twice. He was genial and kindly, but somewhat confused. With the assistance of Irma Brenman Pick, president of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, I made contact with Donald Tyson, Alan's younger brother, who provided me much excellent information. He confirms that Alan Tyson is declining, and is “confined to a home for the elderly mentally infirm.” Despite early senility at seventy-two, Dr. Tyson has kept his joy in living; the staff at the home call him the “Gentle Giant.” I abandoned the idea of recruiting him as a speaker but thought to share what I had learned from my research.
Alan Tyson is a beloved as well as learned man whose translation efforts were made at an early stage in a succession of adult careers: first psychoanalyst, then musicologist. His contribution as analytic translator have been eclipsed in the last thirty years by his devotion to musical scholarship, particularly in the study of the compositions of Beethoven, Mozart, and other classical composers.
Alan Walker Tyson, C.B.E., M.A., M.B., B.S., F.B.A., was born in Glasgow in 1926. He came from an accomplished and developed family, many of whom are educators and professionals. Although his parents lived in London, where his father was Surmaster of St. Paul's School, his mother traveled to Scotland for the birth of each of her three children, of whom Alan was the eldest. He went to Rugby School and Magdalen College, Oxford, studying in a strong classics department. He was chosen as a Prize Fellow of Oxford's All Souls College in 1952. After a productive career of forty-two years, he formally retired in 1994.
I cannot deduce how Alan Tyson got involved with the Stracheys and their translation project with Anna Freud. Tyson was private about his doings and spoke little to his family at the time or later about the analytic work. His brother Donald tells me that Alan Tyson learned German in his mid-twenties (i.e., about 1951) which is remarkable in that it would have been only a little before he became involved in translating Freud starting in 1952 or studying psychoanalysis in 1953.
Alan Tyson was a non-medical candidate at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis in London from 1953 to 1957, after which he practiced analysis clinically from 1957 through 1963 and was involved in teaching in the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and the Tavistock Clinic. He entered medical school after completing training at the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, beginning at University College Hospital Medical School in 1960. He continued through medical and surgical “internships” to “full registration” (which I presume means licensure) in 1967, though he never practiced clinically afterwards. In fact, as I think about his subsequent vocational course, it may be that the medical studies were an effort to augment an analytic training that did not support a whole career, despite early prominence in the Freud project.
Tyson's translation efforts seem to have occupied him in the 1950s and '60s even as his other interests grew. Tyson himself gives the best description of his Freud work in his own curriculum vitae:
One of the editors of the Standard Edition of Freud's complete works since its beginning in 1952 (the others were the general editor James Strachey, his wife Alix Strachey, and Anna Freud). Translator inter alia of Freud's book on Leonardo and The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which have recently appeared from Norton as well as in the Standard Edition.
Donald Tyson shared with me a letter from Anna Freud to Alan Tyson dated September 10, 1955. She writes:
Dear Mr. Tyson, Here is the Leonardo. I am most impressed with the translation and it was a pleasure to revise it. I am sorry that I was so slow. None of the corrections are important, just shades of meaning. The page no. refers to your typescript, the number in brackets to the Ges. Werke. The crosses are marked on the typescript. Looking forward to the visit, Yours Sincerely, Anna Freud.
She seemed to think highly of Tyson's work, as one might infer in any case from his lengthy association with the entire project.
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life was written in 1901; the date of translation is given as 1960. Leonardo was written in 1910, and translated 1957. If 1957 and 1960 date Tyson's main initiatives as he implied in the CV, they fall in the middle of the era of analytic activity, broadly 1952–70. Tyson's sole article in the psychoanalytic literature was written in 1956: “A chronological hand-list of Freud's works,” co-authored with James Strachey; it appeared in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. The fourteen pages list Freud's German and English writings published before November 1955 and were no doubt compiled as part of the study leading to the Standard Edition.
The translating project began before Tyson began formal analytic training, and it continued well past the time of his immersion into music. I can only wonder what must have been going on in his relations with the Stracheys over this period — he was at the beginning a neophyte at the language of analysis as well as German, and at the end primarily a musical scholar. Tyson must have been, as his later career suggests, a man of vast ability to learn and to create in a broad theoretical realm. For references in his CV he lists analysts
Richard Lightbody, M.D., is in private practice. He is president-elect of the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Society. His recent accomplishments include having a new baby girl and being certified by BOPS. As a middle child, he is sensitive to those who are overlooked.
“Dr. Winnicott, President of the British Psychoanalytical Society,” “Miss Anna Freud,” and a prominent academic philosopher and man of letters, “Sir Isaiah Berlin.” This attests to his place in different worlds at the highest levels of influence.
Donald Tyson gives the candid appraisal that Alan Tyson was brilliant in theory but not in matters of practice — in psychoanalysis just as in the musical world, where he proved to be brilliant at theory while “good not great” [his brother's words] as a player of the viola. In music he was a thinker more than a performer, an authority on composers rather than a musician, a master of physical evidence like watermarks in scores and biographical minutiae to deduce dates of composition and influences on music. His work could be described as a psychoanalytic approach to musical historiography. To give a sample of his scholarship, here is a footnote from another author's work, The Age of Beethoven, 1790–1830, edited by G. Abraham:
On the basis of manuscript studies, Tyson demonstrates that the overture known as ‘Leonore no. 1’ was written in 1806–7 with a projected performance of the Opera in Prague. See also Tyson, ‘Yet another “Leonore” Overture?’, Music and Letters, lvii , p. 192.
Published accounts in International Who's Who and Grove's Dictionary of Music report a series of professorial opportunities that reflect a major shift in Tyson's career. It seems that in the 1960s musical scholarship began to overtake analytic work as his major professional identification. At the end of his brief analytic practice, and amidst medical training, he wrote in 1963 a book that seems to be authoritative to his colleagues, called The Authentic English Edition of Beethoven. For a time his careers overlapped: In 1967–68 he was a visiting lecturer in psychiatry at Montefiore Hospital in New York. In 1968–70 he lectured on “Psychopathology and Developmental Psychology” at Oxford. But already in 1969 he was a visiting lecturer at Columbia University in music, as he was to be again in 1977–78 at University of California at Berkeley.
Tyson's present international reputation seems largely built on his musical works, which have been many since the Beethoven 1963 text. The International Who's Who lists ten major publications, with titles like The Beethoven Sketchbook: History, Reconstruction, Inventory (with two co-authors, 1985), and Mozart's Watermarks, in two volumes (1992). Donald Tyson shared with me fragments of recent letters of condolence from American musical scholars, extraordinarily warm, in regard to Dr. Tyson's present illness. The degree of current admiration for Tyson is suggested in a public salutation these scholars spontaneously devised to inaugurate their newsletter in 1997:
This first issue of the Newsletter of the Mozart Society of America is dedicated with fond admiration to Alan Tyson, who by his high originality and dogged persistence has revolutionized the techniques and findings of Mozart research, and by his unfailing generosity has assisted numerous colleagues and generations of their students in carrying out their own work in better form than would have been possible without his help or his example. By his eternally grateful American colleagues.
A festschrift titled Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven: Essays in the Music of the Classical Period. Essays in Honour of Alan is in final preparation, and is scheduled to appear before the end of 1998 from Oxford University Press.
So who is Alan Tyson? A man of many accomplishments, whose ability to learn and to create has led to extensive contributions in the world of music and before that in psychoanalysis. One can only wonder what led to his migration through manifest careers: academic, translator, analyst, physician, musicologist extraordinaire. Each of us is formed by earlier events and is subject to pressures from the present; surfaces change to continuously reflect shifts in our internal compromise formations. It would be a wonderful thing if one could, over a lifetime, develop as richly, and offer so much to so many, as Alan Tyson.