It is surprising that there has not been more fanfare around the publication of the Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. I suppose the interest is relatively specialist, but given the cultural significance of psychoanalysis, it seems strange that such an important new translation should pass without substantial notice beyond the boundary of the Institute of Psychoanalysis. Revised Standard Edition | Institute of Psychoanalysis
Of course, it is that very cultural significance which means Freud is less revered than equivalent figures such as Einstein, because it has led to a disparaging distortion of his legacy. He is the victim of comic misrepresentation both as a theorist (‘he’s just obsessed with sex!’) and as the inventor of psychotherapeutic practice (‘lie back and tell me about your mother…’).
Despite what I have said, the new edition did give rise to a brilliant and well-attended conference at UCL on 21st September.
There were 400 delegates from all over the world, and the organisers apologised that so many people were not allowed to attend because places had filled so quickly.
First to speak was Mark Solms who has supervised the translation. The process began in 1995, when Solms was in his thirties. Now in his 60s, he is an eminent figure, perhaps uniquely straddling the worlds of science (he is a neuroscientist and inventor of the bourgeoning world of neuropsychoanalysis) and the humanities (he trained as an analyst and, as his lecture demonstrated, he is a remarkably gifted and knowledgeable translator). (I first came across him in the essay which is attached to the first post in this blog!)
The revision was undertaken with the many criticisms of James Strachey’s original in mind. As Solms outlined, there is a view, perhaps most famously put forward by Bruno Bettelheim in Freud and Man’s Soul, that Strachey falsely ‘scientised’ Freud. Quite down-to-earth terms such as besetzt, which literally means ‘occupied’ like a lavatory or a country after invasion, are translated by Strachey with unfamiliar terms, in this case cathexis. But what Solms showed in his talk is that scientific language in German is very different; the German term for hydrogen is wasserstoff (literally ‘water stuff’); the German for Cerebellum is kleinhirn (literally ‘little brain’). German does not import Latin and Greek terms for its scientific language, perhaps as an inheritance of Luther’s distaste for the Latin bible. Freud was directly involved in Strachey’s work and wanted the English version to have a scientific feel; for Freud psychoanalysis is a science, but unlike all other sciences it is the science of subjective experience.
The were other excellent speakers. There were fascinating papers by the analysts Catalina Bronstein and Alessandra Lemma, the neuroscientist Karl Friston and a thought-provoking discussion between Jacqueline Rose and Daniel Pick.
I came away buzzing and with a feeling of reverence for psychoanalysis, which can contain so many different and always challenging approaches to the experience of being human.
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