A NOTE ON TRANSLATION

All translations entail a compromise on the part of the translator between the desire to retain the literal meaning of the original and the necessity of rendering it accessible to the reader in a form that is both faithful to the one and comprehensible to the other. Mindful of these constraints, I have attempted to the best of my ability to preserve both the substance and the spirit of Sterba's complex, highly technical, sometimes convoluted scientific discourse in a way that at times makes it appear stilted, or “Germanic”, to the English-speaking reader. Regrettably, it is sometimes necessary to sacrifice faithfulness in favour of comprehensibility.

By the same token, I have attempted to preserve the historical, along with the linguistic, integrity of the work by retaining the alphabetical sequence of the German headings, followed by their English and French equivalents in parentheses in the original form in which Sterba presented them. For the reader's convenience, I have provided an alphabetical list of English headings, along with their German equivalents at the end of the volume.

Being cognisant of criticisms that have been levelled at James Strachey's translation of certain terms and their compounds (e.g., instinct for Trieb; cathexis for Besetzung; parapraxis for Fehlleistung) in the Standard Edition, and at the same time mindful of my obligation to maintain historical authenticity, I have elected to retain the terminology agreed upon by the English Glossary Committee as indicated in the statement on translation of headings that Sterba included in the original volume (see p. ix). In instances where Sterba used certain German expressions involving long compound words or complex phrases—in some cases, perhaps, of his own invention—I have provided the original German in square brackets. In instances where he refers to later entries that are not included in the volume because they appear alphabetically after the letter “G”, I have inserted the original German heading in square brackets after the phrase “see separate entry”.

I have altered Sterba's method of citation, according to which all references to books were cited in full in the text, and references to published papers were keyed to a list of abbreviations primarily of German and Austrian psychoanalytic periodicals in existence at the time of writing, most of which were discontinued before the beginning of World War II. In their place, I have provided the dates, in parentheses, of all works cited in the text, along with their respective authors’ names, keyed to the list of references at the end of the present volume. References to works originally written in German have been replaced by their English counterparts, where they exist. Sterba's citations of the Gesammelte Schriften, the first German edition of Freud's collected works, are represented by their counterparts in the Standard Edition.

I would like to extend my sincere apologies to the reader for any inadvertent errors and omissions that have occurred in the process of my translating this work.

Peter T. Hoffer