Chapter 8 - Translation in and of Psychoanalysis

Summary

While English-speaking readers were the first to have access to a complete translation of Freud’s works, problems remained: apart from deviations like rendering Trieb as ‘instinct’, the Standard Edition was marked by tone distortion, medicalization or loss of idiomaticity. Freud himself insisted that terms like Es (Id or It) were above all common language expressions. Bettelheim and Lacan posited that a critique of translation was a prerequisite before serious work could be done on the texts of psychoanalysis. However, translation had been less a problem than a method for the young Freud, whose polyglotism, quite visible in his youthful correspondence, allowed him to work creatively with the effects of the unconscious by going from transference to translation. Today, new translations of Freud are following these hints and pay more attention to both the fluidity of his vocabulary and the specificity of his concepts.