All translation is to some extent misrepresentation, and translating Freud is no exception. Any new attempt to make Freud’s work accessible to an English-speaking audience must inevitably stand in the shadow of Strachey’s monolithic accomplishment, the ‘standard’ edition and ‘authorized’ translation of Freud’s collected works. It is fashionable to deprecate Strachey’s achievement, and in some respects such criticism is justified, but it would be churlish and inappropriate to dismiss out of hand a translation which remains an invaluable source of reference. The sheer magnitude of the undertaking commands our respect, as does the fact that Strachey was able to refer problems of interpretation to Freud himself.
Like the Authorized Version of the Bible, though, Strachey’s translation of Freud has enshrined certain inaccuracies that only determined iconoclasm can now dispel. And, unlike the Authorized Version, Strachey’s translation does not have rolling and majestic periods to recommend it: indeed, it dismantles Freud’s elegant, dignified German prose and replaces it with something very workaday indeed. In order to convey the sense of what Freud has written, Strachey cuts, simplifies and interprets, sometimes using a number of short sentences to render a single sentence of Freud’s. I have attempted to reflect the internal structure of Freud’s writing, even where there is a risk of appearing convoluted, and to mirror his careful use of balance and repetition in my translation.
The key to Freud’s writing lies in his subtle manipulation of everyday German, his sustained deployment of familiar metaphors to convey unfamiliar and remarkable ideas, Freud was not the father of psychobabble: very few of the terms he coined require a dictionary to make them comprehensible to the ordinarily educated reader. To take a well-known example: in the original German, those three continents in Freud’s map of the mind for which Strachey coined the terms the ‘id’, the ‘ego’ and the ‘superego’, are simply the ‘it’, the ‘I’ and the ‘above-I’,1 a delineation which is readily accessible to any thoughtful reader. The great distortion of Freud’s terminology for which Strachey is responsible is the second reason why a new translation of Freud is urgently necessary, a point of view that Bruno Bettelheim argues eloquently in Freud and Man’s Soul (1982). In the remainder of this preface I shall sketch out the main areas in which I have revised Strachey’s terminology, explaining on what grounds I have done so.
Freud does occasionally use abstruse, scholarly terminology and when this occurs I have made no attempt to simplify it. ‘Endopsychic’, ‘phylogenetic’, ‘affectivity’ all render the equivalent German terms. (Affekt, however, I have translated in accordance with its usual sense of ‘[strong] emotion’.) The last section in the case history of ‘Little Hans’ is headed Epikrise in the German: the term is a specifically medical one, only to be found in loan-word dictionaries at the end of the nineteenth century, and means ‘critical evaluation of the course of an illness’. After some thought I have retained the heading ‘Epicrisis’ in English where Strachey has simply ‘Discussion’.
More usually, however, we find that Freud’s terms are deceptively simple, and the difficulty faced by the translator is that of finding an equally simple – and grammaticall – equivalent, which can be deployed in the same wide variety of contexts and which retains at least something of the metaphorical range of meanings that adhere to the German term. Freud is remarkable for the consistency with which he manipulates a relatively small set of key terms, most of which carry the directness of everyday language; this no doubt contributes to the density and vividness of his writing. At the same time, he is able to introduce distinctions and variations that are quite possible and normal in German but that occasionally stretch the English language to its limits. A useful example of this is provided by the German word Trieb, which Strachey invariably translates as ‘instinct’ but which in fact means ‘drive’. Its root sense is that of driving sheep or cattle; or of being driven to do something. Hence the individual ‘drives’, the forces which motivate us; the energy with which they do so is their Triebkraft, but collectively they might be referred to as the Triebkräfte (driving forces) or as the Triebleben (literally, ‘drive life’) of the individual. Still more problematic is the adjective triebhaft for which there is no single satisfactory English equivalent; for this and for the compound noun Triebregung (literally ‘an impulse or stirring of the drive’) I have opted to use the adjective ‘involuntary’.
Closely related to the concept of drive is that of compulsion, which looms large in the case histories of both the Ratman and the Wolfman. Here the term Zwang (‘compulsion’; from zwingen, to force) and its compound forms recur frequently; its translation poses problems only in the compound term Zwangsneurose, which Strachey renders as ‘obsessional neurosis’. This term has passed into common usage, yet to translate it in this way is not only a mistranslation, but also obscures the connection with the element of compulsion present in all the related terms. For this reason I have opted for ‘obsessive-compulsive neurosis’, which reflects both the correct sense and the commonly accepted one, and at the same time echoes the designation now in general use, ‘obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD)’.
Freud confronts the translator with a further series of problems by using a number of near-synonyms which are nevertheless clearly used in contradistinction to one another. One example is provided by the names he gave to the process on which he was engaged, which he calls variously Analyse (analysis), Behandlung (treatment) and Kur. Kur, a word which is clearly related to the English word ‘cure’, was commonly used to designate the spa treatments that were so fashionable across Europe from the mid-nineteenth century until the Great War (the modern equivalent would probably be a health farm). Its broad sense is thus something like ‘restoration’, but as this would be somewhat recondite in the context, I have chosen instead to use the term ‘therapy’, since to a present-day reader this has the same breadth of scope and familiarity as the notion of ‘taking the waters’ to a contemporary of Freud’s.
Equally central in any description of psychoanalysis are the various terms pertaining to the ‘analysis of the soul’. Nowadays we readily overlook the fact that ‘psyche’ is the Greek word for ‘soul’ and that ‘psycho-analysis’ is, as it were, an oxymoron, but this root sense persists in the cognate German term Seelenkunde (knowledge of the soul). Freud normally uses Psychoanalyse and psychoanalytisch, but refers as often to the individual’s Seelenleben (literally, ‘soul-life’) as to his Psyche. Where Strachey consistently translates Seele and its cognates in a very narrow sense as ‘mind’ or ‘mental’ I have opted for the adjective ‘inner’, translating Seelenleben, for example, as ‘inner life’. Freud makes a further distinction between psychisch (pertaining to the psyche) and psychologisch (pertaining to psychology, i.e. the theory of the psyche); the former I translate ‘psychic’, the latter ‘psychological’.
A further cluster of terms centres – unsurprisingly – on the concept of memory. The usual word is Erinnerung; but Freud also uses the terms Eindruck (impression) and Reminiszenz (reminiscence), one of a number of words found in his writing which has a strong Austrian colouring. In certain contexts (see pp. 234, 247, 249, 301) Eindruck seems to acquire the highly specific sense of what I have called a ‘memory imprint’, that is, a powerful impression that is retained but not processed, like a land of internal snapshot. Reminiszenz I have translated, after discussion with Dr Nicola Luckhurst, as ‘involuntary memory’. The term Deckerinnerung, misleadingly rendered by Strachey as ‘screen memory’, I have translated literally as ‘cover-memory’, by analogy with such concepts as a ‘covering letter’. For the recovery in analysis of what may or may not be memories Freud uses the term konstruieren, meaning ‘to construct’. My own rendering, ‘to reconstruct’, modifies the sense of the original German in the interests of intelligibility: in most contexts ‘construct’/‘construction’ was felt to be ambiguous.
A final area in which one must treat Freud’s near-synonyms with caution is that of psychic defences. The notion of ‘defence mechanisms’ has passed into current usage, but in fact Freud only occasionally uses a term such as Schutzmaßregeln (defensive measures). Much more common is the word Abwehr, used either on its own or in compounds. This indicates ‘fending off’, or more exactly ‘parrying’, and I have translated it accordingly, even though its use is sometimes a little clumsy.
There are a number of single terms used by Freud that merit closer examination. One that is of central importance to the essay ‘Some Character Types Encountered in Psychoanalystic Work’ is that of Versagung. In a key work on Freudian terminology Laplanche and Pontalis discuss the word at some length before concluding somewhat lamely that Strachey’s ‘frustration’ will probably have to do. This is wrong, however: the German term points rather to a withholding of services, a refusal to oblige. (I am indebted to Professor John Reddick, incidentally, for pointing out that intransitive use of the verb is a linguistic development which postdates Freud.) Versagung thus implies that one part of the psyche, the I, is refusing to oblige another part, the it, so that ‘refusal’, though imperfect, is probably the best way to translate the term.
The term ‘fixation’, beloved of psychobabble, is Strachey’s rendering of the perfectly common German word Fixierung. Fixieren means to stare at someone or something, to ‘fix one’s gaze’ upon them. It is admittedly difficult to find a single translation that will fit all the contexts, but the word is a striking example of the way in which we have ‘jargonized’ Freud out of all recognition. In this particular case, I have opted for a variety of renderings but, where possible, I have retained the key sense of the ‘fixed gaze’.
Ichgerecht, a Freudian coinage which Strachey renders with the hair-raising neologism ‘ego-syntonic’, can be translated straightforwardly enough ‘acceptable to the I’. Schaulust, translated by Strachey as ‘scopophilia’, means simply ‘the sexual pleasure derived from looking or watching’. Besetzung, too, is a common German term which Strachey mangles to produce ‘cathexis’. The German besetzen has a variety of meanings including ‘occupy’ (in all senses), ‘possess’ and ‘fill’; it has been suggested that Freud’s particular sense of the term could be rendered as ‘invest’ or ‘charge [with energy]’. I have followed Professor Joyce Crick in opting for the latter, as it seems to me to accord well with Freud’s overall concept of psychic energy.
It is a guiding principle of this new translation of Freud 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. While this obviously has considerable advantages as regards freshness and accuracy, it inevitably obscures the fact that, throughout his work, Freud is remarkably consistent in his choice of terms; moreover, some readers who are already familiar with psychoanalytic jargon may wish to know how particular key terms have been translated. For this reason, where my translation of such terms differs from the standard terminology, the German term will be found in square brackets after its first occurrence in each essay.
The names of people and some places have also been left in German, with an explanatory gloss where appropriate. I acknowledge a debt to D. J. Smith, whose book Discovering Horse-drawn Vehicles (1994) helped me out of some tricky vehicular corners with regard to the case history of Little Hans; and to Dr Almut Suerbaum and Mrs Regina Prince for their assistance with certain impenetrable words and phrases. (Forschung, as Freud himself makes clear, is an activity that combines notions of research, inquiry and exploration in more or less equal measure!) I am particularly grateful to my husband Ian Huish for his critical scrutiny of my typescript; any errors or infelicities that remain are my own responsibility.
1. The simplicity of the terminology has been retained in all the other major European languages.