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: ernst falzeder : page seventeen
Spring, Ludwig von Hofmann, 1895, courtesy of Gemäldegalerie Neue Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Atreus, the king of Mycenae, had a brother,
Thyestes, who bitterly resented Atreus’ kingship.
Thyestes seduced his brother’s wife, and in revenge,
Atreus invited Thyestes to a “reconciliation dinner,”
during which Atreus served a stew whose main ingredient
was the flesh of Thyestes’ own sons. After
Thyestes found out what Atreus had done, he pronounced
a terrible curse on the house of Atreus —
that generation after generation of family members
would destroy each other.
I am not a Jung specialist. As somebody once
said, it takes some seven years to get at least an
overview of a particular field in science, and I’m still
a bit short of that. My main area of expertise is
Freud scholarship and the history of psychoanalysis,
and I underwent a classical Freudian training analysis.
I know much more about Freud than I do about
Jung. Unlike other “echt” Freudians, however, I’ve
read my Jung, and I had another analysis with a
Jungian. So, in translating Jung, I involuntarily compared
the two as regards content and language.
Now this is a wide field, some might even say a
mine field. So here let me just confine myself to saying
that I was struck by what one could call two
trends in Jungian and Freudian circles in the late
1930s. Freudians were more and more preoccupied
with so-called ego psychology, mechanisms of
defense against the unconscious (see Anna Freud’s
seminal work [1936]), on adaptation, even “conflict-free
zones in the ego,” as Heinz Hartmann
called them (1939). In Freud’s later works, you
won’t find many references to what he had started
out with: everyday phenomena such as dreams
(which he had called the via regia into the unconscious),
slips of the tongue, jokes, and actual sex.
The focus is on metapsychology, cultural theory,
psychology of religion, social psychology, etc. Jung,
on the other hand, seems to have delved even deeper
into the unconscious forces, past the defenses that
the Freudians so extensively studied. This is particularly
evident in the case of children’s dreams, which
Freud had dismissed as simple, as “dreams in which
there was no distortion or only a very little… They
are short, clear, coherent, easy to understand and
unambiguous” (1916–17, p. 126).
This is clearly not Jung’s standpoint, at least as
far as “big” dreams are concerned. Another important
difference is, in my opinion, that Jung sees the
dream as a whole, as a miniature drama complete
with introduction, exposition, peripateia, and lysis,
and does not dissect it into its single components,
to each of which the dreamer then has to free associate.
Free association, as Jung sees it, will always
lead you to your complexes, in fact, you could associate
to just anything to arrive there, but it will not
reveal the secret of that particular dream.
On the linguistic level, I have done a few Freud
translations, in particular, I supervised the translation
into English of the Freud/Abraham correspondence
(2002), which I edited. For a translator,
Freud is a tough nut to crack. His German reads
very well, is fluent and idiomatic; I think there is no