Some years ago a brouhaha started about the Strachey translation of Freud's works, known as the Standard Edition. Some date the beginning of this chorus of criticism with Bruno Bettelheim's New Yorker article in 1982 that appeared later in book form as Freud and Man's Soul (1983).1 But the concerns had been brewing for years, even before Strachey's monumental work was finished.2 The controversy was about whether Freud was translated properly. Some claimed he wrote in natural, emotive language, and his elegant, moving German style showed his concern with how life was for each individual person and spoke to all of us. Strachey, so the critics claimed, always opted for a scientific tone. And so the controversy raged, with international meetings devoted to the question, as a considerable literature developed around the problem of translating Freud.3 In addition, the anticipated expiration of the copyrights led to talk of a new translation to replace the Standard Edition.
Strachey was specific: “The imaginary model which I have always kept before me is of the writings of some Englishman of science of wide education born in the middle of the 19th century.”4 And he emphasized the Englishness of his model. I feel that Strachey was not far off the mark in his portrayal of Freud in the guise of an English gentleman and Victorian man of science. Freud would have been, I think, quite pleased to have been taken for such a personage. Strachey's model amounts to an extrapolation of Freud's view of himself.
The theme of Freud's narcissism was explored in a novel by Israel Rosenfield, Freud's Megalomania.5 Daniel Mendelsohn, in his review of that novel, cites Freud's grumpy comments in Chronik, his private diary, for November 1930, witnessing his disappointment over failing to obtain a Nobel prize: “Definitively passed over for Nobel Prize.” As Mendelsohn notes, Freud had been awarded Germany's most prestigious literary honor, the Goethe Prize, just some three months earlier. So much for his desire to be a popular author, he wanted to be known for his science. Much of the criticism of the translation has had to do with the “scientistic” format that Strachey was said to have imposed on the texts. But Freud was ambitious and somewhat arriviste, and being a scientist was his way of achieving the success, rewards, and recognition that he coveted. The Project and the early pre-psychoanalytic writings are quite unambiguously “scientific.” Often, his supposedly homey, ordinary, emotive prose addressed to the common man is as hard and precise and clear as a scientist can be.
Freud was deeply perplexed that his case reports resembled novels and short stories, but he was struggling with philosophical problems about the explanation of human behavior. It is a field that has come to be known as philosophical psychology, with psychoanalysis as a prime example of a discipline that straddles both science and the humanities. Freud became painfully aware of some of these philosophical problems, and was puzzled by them, as have been philosophers who have turned to this issue since.
Has Strachey's model really harmed our understanding of Freud? It is hardly comparable to Benjamin Jowett's stilted and often prudish translation of Plato, which presented Plato as a stuffy English gentleman, and did a grave injustice even though it helped to popularize the Dialogues. Yet, since we have always had the text of Plato and many other translations to rely on, there was no lasting harm done except perhaps to create a false image of Plato for the general, Greekless reader. Perhaps the same control could have been exercised for the Strachey translation. We have always had a German text with which to compare it.
Or have we? Only after a fashion. Strachey's work was pioneering as a major step toward establishing an eventual standard German edition. The critics never intended to minimize the enormous contribution Strachey made in pulling together, organizing, cataloguing, sorting out, and providing the historical framework for the whole corpus of Freud's psychological writings and the development of his theory. Even the limited and tentative attempt at producing an adequate German text of Freud, the Studienausgabe, resorted to translating Strachey's notes and editorial apparatus and incorporating them into the German text of that edition. The unfinished and inchoate state of the German editions is now common knowledge.
Emmett Wilson, Jr., M.D., Ph.D., is a child psychiatrist. He is on the editorial board of The Psychoanalytic Quarterly.
Meanwhile, the French, whose editions of Freud were even more chaotic than pre-Strachey English versions, have brought out a new translation. The French rejected a “Strachey français” and opted instead for a translation so faithful to the original in all its subtleties and complexities, that the French itself may be distorted or transformed by a highly regulated program of terms and principles. In the process, their approach has led to extensive discussions of the problems of translation. An important volume about translating Freud has appeared.6 The outcome of all the discussion has been new, fundamental reflections on Freud's thought as well as his language.
As the call for new translations of Freud is made, it is important to realize that we still have much to learn about Freud's thought, theory, and his language. Translation may be the royal road to this deeper understanding. Translation requires thinking about every word, and discussing and thinking out possible different translations for the German original. It leads to a detailed examination of the text itself.
The verdict has not yet been reached on their work. But the French are, as usual, on to something in focusing on the nature of translation and the differences in their language and Freud's. As the call for new translations of Freud is made, it is important to realize that we still have much to learn about Freud's thought, theory, and his language. Translation may be the royal road to this deeper understanding. Translation requires thinking about every word, and discussing and thinking out possible different translations for the German original. It leads to a detailed examination of the text itself. This is something that does not happen to the same extent when reading a text in one's own language. As Grubrich-Simitis comments: “[T]he German-speaking reader, not being in this questioning, alien, and eccentric position with respect to the original words, as a rule remains unaware of these dimensions.”7
Criticism of Strachey has become more muted, and a more reasoned approach has developed. There seems to be little danger now that anyone would attempt to bring out a new, definitive English translation to replace Strachey, before a definitive German text is established. Under the auspices of the British Institute of Psycho-Analysis, Mark Solms is preparing a revised version of Strachey's Standard Edition, as well as the neuroanatomical writings. Some specific changes will be incorporated, such as the substitution of “drive” for “instinct,” but still the format and tone of the original Strachey translation, with many of its controversial aspects, will be preserved. Strachey would probably approve, for he refers to the Standard Edition as a “pioneering work, with all the inevitable errors and blunders that that involves.”8 On some points of translation we have come to different conclusions, though Strachey was often aware of the problems. And some of his choices may come to be accepted over time.9
Partly in response to the criticism of the Standard Edition, along with the opportunism involved with the expiration of the copyrights, the Penguin Freud Project was put forward. Edited by Adam Phillips, a British analyst, it aims to present a literary Freud, who, like every other writer, is endlessly redescribable and endlessly re-translatable. Some see this as part and parcel of the move away from the “science” of psychoanalysis, as an attempt to revamp psychoanalysis as hermeneutic, as humanistic, placing Freud in a cultural context.
The Penguin Project is happily unencumbered by the need to standardize that characterizes both the French edition and the Standard Edition. The guiding principle enunciated in this new translation of Freud is that each translator should respond to Freud's writing in his or her own way, and that there should be no “party line” on the translation of technical terms. The translators come from literary rather than psychoanalytic backgrounds, and are experienced in translating German and other languages. In the translators' prefaces we find comments such as: “[I had] an anti-agenda—I was on my own with the text, not part of any regulated translation project, not subject to standardization or group politics.”10
The new translations are indeed much more readable, much livelier, much less stilted, than Strachey's, and most use a more colloquial, relaxed tone. This is helped not only by having a different translator, but also a different introducer, adding a certain sprightliness to each volume. The introductions range from the superficial to the pedantic. The presentation is attractive, in paperback with fanciful cover art, e.g., paintings by Magritte or Max Ernst. From an analytic standpoint the lack of acquaintance of the translators with the field in which they are translating is regrettable, sometimes amusing, as for example, avoiding the term '“infantile” because the children referred to “are not infants.” But this dissonance to an analytic ear is a small price to pay for the relative lack of psychobabble and jargon. The trade-off is a freshness and generally a liveliness that is lacking in Strachey.
There are problems. The new translations are not necessarily a smoother read. There are many infelicities, along with the freshness. At times the translation leads to forced and distorted English. As one translator states, “The word choices I have made don't…always make things easier for the reader or easier for the
ear” and, as an example, she cites Affekt, translated as “affect” rather than “feeling,” for “a language of feeling…was too everyday and undifferentiated.”11 Another admits that her translation is sometimes syntactically awkward. Another acknowledges that her translation runs into “occasional obscurities in Freud's own language, and certainly some contortion in my attempts to render it.”12 The translations are not all that free of psychobabble. The shadow of the Standard Edition and the fact that psychoanalysis is an active field with its own language somewhat decreases the translators' freedom of expression. Sometimes references to the Standard Edition are given as a comparative and contextual aid. The advantage of freshness in terminology also unfortunately obscures the fact that Freud was consistent throughout his work in his choice of terms. To help those who know psychoanalytic jargon and want to know how particular key terms have been translated, the German is sometimes found in square brackets.
Perhaps then one of the more interesting aspects of the Penguin Freud Project is the translators' notes, which, unfortunately, are all too brief and limited. The translators are feeling their way toward translating Freud. We have much to learn from the translators and from making our own comparative studies of the translations. The new translations will open up new ways to hear Freud—to hear things that are latent in the text and that might otherwise be passed over.
Let us hope there will be many more translations. As Grubrich-Simitis comments: “[I]t would be desirable for more new translations to be made in the next few years, if only of individual works….”13 These new translations will result in important work on the problems of translating Freud into English, with reflections on the interrelations between German and English, with the attendant deepening understanding of Freud's thought. Even though an analyst would have to struggle perhaps harder against the Standard Edition, it would be helpful if some new translations were done by analysts, for there are theoretical and clinical aspects that will not likely be available to a person who comes from a literary background. We now no longer want one person's view of the whole corpus, but rather we benefit from the input and views of many on how to render Freud's German into English. And I, personally, would hope for some new translations to appear in a Budé type of bilingual presentation, so that the German text is always with us, as it should be.
What about a future Standard German Edition? Ilse Grubrich-Simitis has given us the history of the factors that have frustrated the production of a historical-critical edition in Germany. She has also provided many suggestions and even a draft of the presumed requirements for bringing about the complete German Standard Edition.14 It will require not only German analysts, but also German linguistic specialists. And we may hope someday to be entirely free of the restrictions upon the use of the Freud Archives and from the interference of the Freud family that has been so often recalcitrant and unhelpful in putting together a, or the, Standard German Edition of Freud. Strachey's thanks for the use of photostatic copies should perhaps be considered as irony, given the nature of photostatic copies in the 1950s, when the actual manuscripts were only a few miles away.15
The main criticism of Strachey should be not the alleged scientism, but, as Samuel Weber16 has argued, that Freud was rendered less problematic than he actually is by the Standard Edition. The Standard Edition distorts because it presumes that the original text knows what it is talking about, or at least what it wants to say—a presumption that may be just plain wrong in dealing with a discourse about the unconscious that involved the Copernican revolution of displacing consciousness from its central role. We must, according to Weber, pay attention not only to the manifest content, the words on Freud's page, but to the latent, as yet unpacked, meanings, as Freud struggled to express what had not been expressed and was not perhaps expressible. Unpacking means not only making explicit the intellectual content, as when, for example, we find a whole theory sketched in the few lines of a footnote, a note we have not understood fully for decades. There is also unpacking in Weber's sense, of close scrutiny of the German text with the idea of finding in it deeper meanings than the denotative surface. And I do not mean a furthering of the furor biographicus about the man, Freud, that has so plagued Freud studies over the past few decades, but a deeper understanding of the psychic phenomena that Freud was struggling to explain. This is the “return” to the texts of Freud that all, each in his own way, have called for, Strachey, Lacan, Foucault, Roustang, Ornstein, Weber, Laplanche et al, and now Grubrich-Simitis, with her call for a return to the manuscripts. The eventual, and inevitable, appearance of a standard and complete German edition of Freud should not end this search for the deeper meanings of the text, but actually intensify it.
(1983) Freud and Man's Soul. New York: Alfred A. Knopf
1961, 1955. “Some Notes on English Freudian Terminology.” Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, vol. 9, pp. 331-39. “Process or Structure.” Psychoanalytic Review, vol. 53, pp. 50-54.
, (ed.) 1992; Translating Freud. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
St. Ed. Vol. I, General Preface, p. xix.
Freud's Megalomania. New York: Norton, 2000. Mendelsohn's review appeared in The New York Review of Books, Vol. LXVII, No. 17. Nov. 2, 2000, pp. 26-29.
, , , and Traduire Freud, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1989.
, Back to Freud's Texts. , tr New York and London: Yale University Press, 1996, p. 3.
St. Ed. Volume I. General Preface, p. xviii.
, “Reflections on Cathexis.” Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Vol. LXXIV (2005), pp. 1127-35.
, in Translator's Preface, Freud, S., and Breuer, J. Studies in Hysteria. New York: Penguin, 2004, p. xxxv.
, in Translator's Preface, Freud, S., and Breuer, J. Studies in Hysteria. New York: Penguin, 2004, pp. xxvii-xxxix.
, in “Translator's Preface,” Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Penguin, 2003, p. xxxvi.
, in “Translator's Preface,” Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Penguin, 2003, p. 3.
, in “Translator's Preface,” Sigmund Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Penguin, 2003, Part Three, pp. 239-271.
(1984). Personal communication.
. The Legend of Freud. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Pp. xvi-xvii.