Reading Freud: In General and in English Translation in Particular

Reading Sigmund Freud is a challenge, something I have been doing for several months. One reason is his approach to the science of psychology and a second is the English translations.
 
Freud was trained as a medical doctor specializing in neurophysiology at the University of Vienna, though in his first year he attended the lectures of Aristotelian scholar Franz Brentano and was influenced by him. As a young man, Freud worked six years in a physiology lab and three more in a hospital where he focused on cerebral anatomy. In 1886, at age 30, he opened his medical practice and began treating patients for psychological problems. He did not close the practice until shortly before his death in 1939.
 
In 1895, Freud drafted a “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” premised entirely on neurophysiology, but it was never completed or published in his lifetime, most likely because his treatment of patients convinced him of the need to view psychology as a mental science. While Freud in his mature and later life was neither a materialist nor a reductionist, some neurophysiological jargon permeates his work, such as charge and discharge of energy, excitation, and innervation. He was a determinist his entire life, but the reader can overcome this obstacle by focusing on his conceptualizations of psychology and his methods of therapy.
 
The worst challenge in reading Freud is the translations. I do not know German, though I have frequently consulted several online and printed German-English dictionaries, and occasionally have looked at this website, freud2lacan.com, where many of Freud’s works are posted as bilingual texts, English on one side of the page, German on the other.
 
My references for criticism of the translations are three native German speakers: philosopher Walter Kaufmann (20-27), Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettelheim (all of his 112-page book, Freud and Man’s Soul), and Freud biographer Peter Gay (465-66). The three overlap in their critiques, though Bettelheim’s is the most extensive.
 
I will focus on mistranslations and neologisms, but let me first give Kaufmann credit for setting the tone by asserting that the English translations of philosopher Immanuel Kant improve Kant’s writing style (!), while the translations of Freud make him worse. He also says that Freud’s “style is so colorful that the best translations often cannot be more adequate than black-and-white photographs of great paintings.”
 
Kaufmann goes on to cite Peter Gay (see footnote in my August post) who said the translations make Freud more diffuse and verbose (prolix) and gentrified, scholarly, academic (genteel) than he really is. The word in my mind is sterile.*
 
Bettelheim (5-8, 108) says the translations make Freud impersonal and abstract with Latinized and Greekized words and sometimes translate him in the passive voice when Freud uses the active. Freud is even made to sound behavioristic, apparently in order to make him more “scientific,” which in philosophic terms means more positivistic, which Freud was not!
 
Bettelheim became aware of the problems with the English translations when he was at the University of Chicago’s Orthogenic School from 1944-73. His staff and students, as non-German speakers, read Freud in English, which made them view him and psychoanalysis “at a distance.”
 
The most egregious (my word) mistranslation is of the German word trieb, translated throughout as “instinct.” The real meaning is drive, the urge to act when a need is not being satisfied. The hunger drive is offered by Freud as analogous to his life and death drives. (More on these next month). Freud rarely uses the German equivalent for instinct (instinkt) and only to refer to the alleged automatic knowledge that guides animal behavior.**
 
The use of “instinct” makes Freud look unscientific and an advocate of innate knowledge. Freud uses the term “drive” as a cause that “makes somatic demands upon the mind,” but these demands are changeable and compete with one another (An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, 17). They are not instincts.
 
Indeed, Bettelheim (105) insists that the title of Instincts and Their Vicissitudes, one of Freud’s later works in English, should be translated as “Drives and Their Mutability.”
 
The most egregious neologism—this time “egregious” is Peter Gay’s word—is the Greek import  cathexis. Freud wrote using common German words, Besetzung being one of them with many connotations. The meaning of the word as Freud used it is occupation, as in military occupation. It is sometimes translated in other languages as load or investment (of emotion). Freud suggested the word “interest,” and in the 1926 Britannica.com summary of psychoanalysis, written by Freud, the words “affective charge” are used. Besetzung is a term of value and emotion and the “occupation” is a quantity—high or low, strong or weak—of emotional energy.
 
Thus, I might say I am highly “cathected” in the family dog, or rather, “occupied” with a lot of value and emotion in him. My brain, however, still freezes when I come upon cathexis or any of its word forms (hypercathexis, anticathexis, etc.) in the translations. I must pause to review the context of the word before continuing.
 
Another neologism, parapraxis, can be dispensed with quickly. Fehlleistungen means faulty action or achievement, or in common English parlance Freudian slip—of the tongue, pen, memory. Why the Greek?
 
Other mistranslations (Bettelheim, chap. 8): id, ego, and superego in German are das Es, das Ich, and das Über-Ich. They should be what they are, and are so translated in the French and Spanish editions, the it, the I, and the upper-I. “The it,” a word used by Friedrich Nietzsche and a contemporary physician of Freud’s, was chosen to describe the unconscious because Freud’s patients would say something like, “It got me again” or “It makes life unbearable.” “The I,” in German can mean the self or personality; “self” is the word I substitute when reading the English. Über can mean above or over, but I like Bettelheim’s “upper-I,” because it emphasizes that our conscience is a part of our minds (implying that we put it there), not some compartment separate from the self or mind. The Latinizations make Freud and our understanding of the mind sterile. Cold technical jargon, as Bettelheim says (53).
 
Though many more mistranslations can be found in Bettelheim’s book (chap. 10) and in Independent Judgment and Introspection (81n56), one final one is for the subject of psychology as Freud discusses it. The German word is Seele, which means soul, and Seele, Freud points out, is the German translation of the Greek word for soul, psyche. Thus, psychology is the science of the soul, not mind or consciousness, though it can include both, and soul is neither immortal nor related to religion. For Freud, according to Bettelheim (77), soul means “that which is most valuable in man while he is alive.” It is not just the seat of reason, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the seat of emotion. It defines who we are and what motivates us.***
 
To conclude and say something positive about the translations, James Strachey was editor and translator of what is called the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. It was a major accomplishment, twenty-four volumes published between 1953 and 1974, every volume with an excellent index and an abundance of footnotes and bracketed comments that explain, for example, someone from Freud’s era whom we would not today recognize. It is still the most significant scholarly work in English on Freud. There is supposedly a “Revised Standard Edition” coming out soon, but I have not yet seen it.
 
Next month, “Freud as Scientist.”
 
 
* Kaufmann, I should further point out, makes it clear that Freud was neither dogmatic nor intolerant. The smears against him, aside from much suspicion, laughter, outrage, and disgust thrown at psychoanalysis by the local Viennese who had not read him, derive from the resentments and complaints of Freud’s former devotees, Alfred Adler and Carl Jung (Kaufmann, 195-204, 325-50). The former, in particular, referred to psychoanalysis as “filth and fecal matter” (Kaufmann, 199). Gay (410) acknowledges that Freud is a “determinist, [but] not a fatalist,” a reference to the misunderstanding that we are allegedly and completely controlled by the unconscious, which ignores Freuds frequent assertions that in therapy the unconscious must be made conscious.
 
** Today, the concept “instinct” should be dispensed with as invalid. Biologists have made great progress in explaining animal behavior, whether it is how to hunt (they learn from their parents, siblings, or by trial-and-error), to migrate to warmer weather (birds use information from the sun, stars, and magnetic field), or to find their way home (cats use the magnetic field and scent).
 
*** After completing this essay, I discovered H. F. Brull’s excellent 1975 paper, “A Reconsideration of Some Translations of Sigmund Freud.” A native German speaker, born in Berlin, Brull at age twelve, in 1933, emigrated to the United States. For most of his career he was a social worker with children and high school students. Brull asserts that psychoanalysis is “at once a scientific method for investigating the mind of man and a therapy for tortured souls.” I will be referring to this paper more in a later post.
 
And the more I read Freud, the more I discover additional criticisms of the standard translations, as well as improved contemporary ones (published within the last twenty-five years). Here are two: Beyond the Pleasure Principle and Other Writings (2003) and The Penguin Freud Reader (2006).