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28 The Translator’s Invisibility
analysis; both represent the subject as healing the determinate split
in its own consciousness. Yet insofar as Freud’s various psychic
models theorized the ever-present, contradictory determinations of
consciousness, the effect of his work was to decenter the subject,
to remove it from a transcendental realm of freedom and unity and
view it as the determinate product of psychic and familial forces
beyond its conscious control. These conflicting concepts of the
subject underlie different aspects of Freud’s project: the
transcendental subject, on the one hand, leads to a definition of
psychoanalysis as primarily therapeutic, what Bettelheim calls a
“demanding and potentially dangerous voyage of self-discovery
[…] so that we may no longer be enslaved without knowing it to
the dark forces that reside in us” (ibid.:4); the determinate subject,
on the other hand, leads to a definition of psychoanalysis as
primarily hermeneutic, a theoretical apparatus with sufficient
scientific rigor to analyze the shifting but always active forces that
constitute and divide human subjectivity. Freud’s texts are thus
marked by a fundamental discontinuity, one which is “resolved” in
Bettelheim’s humanistic representation of psychoanalysis as
compassionate therapy, but which is exacerbated by the scientistic
strategy of the English translations and their representation of
Freud as the coolly analyzing physician. 11 The inconsistent diction
in the Standard Edition, by reflecting the positivistic redefinition of
psychoanalysis in Anglo-American institutions, signifies another,
alternative reading of Freud that heightens the contradictions in
his project.
It can be argued, therefore, that the inconsistent diction in the
English translations does not really deserve to be judged erroneous;
on the contrary, it discloses interpretive choices determined by a
wide range of social institutions and cultural movements, some (like
the specific institutionalization of psychoanalysis) calculated by the
translators, others (like the dominance of positivism and the
discontinuities in Freud’s texts) remaining dimly perceived or
entirely unconscious during the translation process. The fact that the
inconsistencies have gone unnoticed for so long is perhaps largely
the result of two mutually determining factors: the privileged status
accorded the Standard Edition among English-language readers and
the entrenchment of a positivistic reading of Freud in the Anglo-
American psychoanalytic establishment. Hence, a different critical
approach with a different set of assumptions becomes necessary to
perceive the inconsistent diction of the translations: Bettelheim’s