Letter from Sigmund Freud to Ernest Jones, February 1, 1927

1 February 1927
Vienna, IX. Berggasse 19

Dear Jones,

I am very sorry that my permission to P. Clark to translate “Hemmung, Symptom und Angst” distressed you so much, as is evident from the tone and content of your letter. “I meant no harm.”1 Even the tragic note in Mrs. Riviere's exclamation seems to me hardly warranted. You must bear in mind that you only very rarely let me have news of the works and plans of Hogarth Press and that, until your last letter, I was really under the impression that the English rights had nothing to do with the American rights, that translations of the former would not interfere with those of the latter. Your letter is the first corrective, with its valuable information that an English publisher will not readily publish a translation of a book if a translation of it is already circulating in America. I will act accordingly and immediately stop my endeavors to obtain American translations of the Selbsdarstellung and Laienanalyse.

However, this brings up another question to which I request an early reply. What is the position regarding American translations of books that Hogarth Press has already published in England? Would you or they be just as opposed if a translation of Massenpsychologie, for example, were to be planned in America? Naturally, I would yield to you in this case too, but would ask you to consider what that means. As our excellent English translators work with unnatural slowness, the first concession already involves the risk that the English-speaking readership will be deprived of access to the writings in question for too long. Laienanalyse, for example, is a piece addressing a specific issue, probably of no interest in several years' time. By then the question may well have been settled. For the