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).

Dreams and the Subconscious*

Aristotle said dreams, as paraphrased by Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, 36-37), are “mental activity of the sleeper in so far as he is asleep.” They are not supernatural messages from the gods.
 
Freud’s study of dreams said they are harmless hallucinations when asleep, unconscious urges expressed as a wish or urges from our “day’s residues” (waking life) expressed as a wish, or some combination.
 
He did not say that dreams are all about sex, as some critics have alleged! (And symbolism, sexual or otherwise must be related to the dreamers private meanings.)
 
Let us elaborate.
 
By analyzing an enormous number of dreams of both normal people and people with psychological problems, Freud provided a valuable contribution to psychology, the identification of primary and secondary processes of consciousness and a better understanding of the unhealthy processes.
 
For dreams in particular, he gave detailed descriptions of their nature, including a terminology to use for analysis and a three-part classification of them.**
 
“Manifest content” is the actual events of the dream that we experience, weird and distorted as they may be. “Latent content” is the underlying dream thoughts that evoked the dream. And “dreamwork” is the mental process that transforms the latent into the manifest. The work of dream analysis is to trace this transformation and identify the meaning of the dream.
 
Manifest dreams, Freud thought, are considerably condensed, versus the actual events of a memory, and exhibit a great deal of displacement, that is, the shifting or substitution of minor elements from reality to major ones in the dream or vice versa, or some mixture. As often occurs a single dream can have several elements, including contraries or contradictions side by side one another.
 
The simplest and most fundamental dream is the child’s direct wish fulfillment. For example, a little girl who was ill during the day and forbidden to eat strawberries experienced an elaborate dream of eating “strawbewwies and omblet” during the night. And a little boy whose hike to a nearby mountain was cut short for lack of time dreamed of his conquering the mountain.
 
Of course, adults can experience direct wish fulfillments, such as having to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and dreaming of sitting beside a waterfall, or of being hungry and dreaming of a gourmet meal, or, yes, of dreaming about sex. But most of our dreams are distorted. Why?
 
In addition to the direct wish fulfillment, Freud classifies dreams as either anxiety dreams or punishment dreams. In my case, if I may cite a recurring dream, I retired from teaching in 2015, but find myself since dreaming about being late for class and/or unprepared, which never happened in thirty-six years of teaching. And in some versions, the building I am belatedly trying to get into to teach a class is the junior high school I attended in my hometown! (Anxiety dreams can be experienced as nightmares, though I have not experienced these dreams that way.).
 
The underlying dream thoughts: I do have an anxiety about being late to any appointment and prefer to arrive five to ten minutes before the appointed hour. How is this a wish? Freud would say that when asleep my subconscious brings up the repressed anxiety and emotions of embarrassment and humiliation about being late, then distorts the wish of being on time, turning my latent dream thought into a distorted manifest dream, perhaps as a caution to be extra careful about appointments.
 
And the junior high school building? I think there is an element of direct wish fulfillment here, as I do have a fondness for the building. Both of my older brothers attended it when it was a senior high school and I attended many an enjoyable performance in the school’s auditorium, plus basketball games in the gymnasium and high school football games in the nearby stadium. But no, I never had a desire to teach in that building. One might say, “all school buildings look alike,” hence the displacement.
 
Punishment dreams often dredge up unpleasant events from the past that the dreamer experienced as embarrassing or humiliating, sometimes resulting in a sense of guilt. A well-known author in his younger years was a tailor, which he preferred not to think about, but repeatedly dreamed about those years. Similarly, Freud admits that he was not particularly competent when working as a young man at the Chemical Institute, yet in his successful older years continually dreamed about those humiliating days. How is this wish fulfillment?
 
Punishment dreams, says Freud, are not wishes of subconscious drives or memories, but of “a special critical and prohibiting agency” in the mind, the above-I, Über-ich in Freud’s German (New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, 34).*** Punishment dreams are a wish of punishment for the sense of guilt from earlier days.
 
At this point, Freud discusses the issue of traumatic dreams, especially those of war trauma or, in modern terms, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Trauma is experienced as the emotion of fright, which is terror deriving from an unpreparedness for and surprise at the severity of the threatening event. Freud concedes that it is difficult to call these dreams wish fulfillments and suggests that the dreamwork fails to transform the memories into a wish fulfillment.
 
Let me object, though, and suggest that, as Freud acknowledges, all psychological processes are continuums from normal to abnormal, thus the punishment and traumatic dreams may be variations on the anxiety dreams. We all differ in how we react to negative events in our lives, depending on the level of self-esteem we each have, other inner resources, and the severity of the trauma. And there are war veterans who do not suffer PTSD.
 
Sleepers who have traumatic dreams are often awakened feeling acute anxiety, because the dreams just as often are exact replicas of the traumatic event. The dream and anxiety indicate the amount of fright experienced during the initial event, along with the lack of preparedness for such a terror. Afterwards, an emotion of guilt that says, “why me?” can easily arise—that is, a guilt for having survived the terror when one’s comrades did not. Punishment dreams? Sounds like it.
 
Freud’s work on dreams, answering the critics in his time who regarded dreams as meaningless, considerably elaborated Aristotle’s identification of dreams as mental activity while asleep.
 
His work led him to make an important distinction between the actions of our subconscious mind and the conscious level of reason. He called the former “primary process,” because it arose in the evolutionary process before our human conscious mind, which he called “secondary process.” The higher animals exhibit a primary-process consciousness, and a modicum of choice, though not a true, self-aware volitional consciousness.
 
Primary process seems random, meaning no predictable pattern, but as Freud demonstrated dreams are not random. He recognized that the source of psychological problems, both neurotic and psychotic, this last called by many thinkers “waking dreams” (Interpretation, 115), can be found in our subconscious primary-process minds.
 
Which is why Freud wrote many times that the goal of psychotherapy is to “make the unconscious conscious.”
 
Later psychiatrists, Eilhard von Domarus and Silvano Arieti, based on their study of schizophrenics, offered additional explanations how our subconscious mental processes do have a logic to them, albeit a lesser logic than what our conscious minds are capable of generating.
 
(To be continued next month)
 
 
* See the appendix to Independent Judgment and Introspection, 177-80, for my reasons for considering the prefix “sub-” more correct than Freud’s “un-” when talking about consciousness.
 
** In addition to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud discussed dreams in the shorter book On Dreams (1901) and in chapters or segments of later works: Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (part II, 1915-17), New Introductory Lectures (lecture xxx, 1933), and in the highly concise but incomplete posthumous publication An Outline of Psychoanalysis (chap. v, written in 1938, published in 1940).
 
*** Freud wrote Über-ich, the above- or over- I. Latinized English translations make Freud “both more prolix and more genteel than he really was,” giving us such neologisms as superego. “Prolix and genteel” are the words of Freud biographer Peter Gay (quoted in Kaufmann, 23). They mean diffuse and verbose (prolix) and gentrified, scholarly, academic (genteel). More on the English translations in a later post.