Search

Skip to main content Accessibility help

Only show content I have access to (0)

Chapters (1)

Last 3 years (1)

From year:

To year:

Apply

Literature (1)

Cambridge University Press (1)

1 results

Chapter 8 - Translation in and of Psychoanalysis
- By Jean-Michel Rabaté
Edited by Jan Steyn, University of Iowa
Book:

Translation

Published online:

23 September 2022

Print publication:

22 September 2022, pp 126-139
- Chapter
- - Get access
    
    Check if you have access via personal or institutional login
    
    Log in Register
- Export citation
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.