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9 July 1920
111 Harley Street, London
Dear Professor,
I have just seen the Bernays translation.1 No translator's name is mentioned, and Bernays plays a Yankee trick by putting on the title page
Authorized Translation
With Preface
By
Stanley Hall.
Hall (who was a pupil of Wundt's) draws a long parallel between you and Wundt, closing with the hope that you will not follow Wundt in parting from your best pupils such as Adler. The translation is loose and rapidly done, full of vulgar Americanisms. You are made to speak in a very unworthy style, so that the reader must get an unfavourable impression of your personality. The translator does not seem to be an analyst, for he makes such mistakes as using “suppression” for “Verdrängung” in spite of our efforts to make “repression” a technical term distinguished from suppression. Still it is perhaps better than Brill's translations, for I have not noticed any performances quite equal to his famous rendering of halluzinatorische Besetzung as “an hallucinatory occupation”.2
I am arranging, I trust with your permission, that an English translation be published in London by the Press and Unwin on the plan of half profits, they providing the capital. We are offering Bernays ψα25 for the right to use his translation as a basis, but of course it will be re-written. I cannot see the need of any introduction, with the exception, perhaps, of some sentences by me on the paper jacket and advertisements.
Is the enclosed interview authentic?
Could you spare time to give me the answer to a technical question?
On S. 282 of the 4. Sammlung, and elsewhere in your writings, you speak of the Anziehung des schon Verdrängten as a factor in further repression.3 Do you mean this literally, that a force is exercised [on the part of]4 by the repressed, or would you agree to the following formulation? That material which becomes associated with repressed material becomes thereby subject to the same psychical conditions as the latter, i.e. also acted on by th