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Peter Loewenberg 53/3
WILD ANALYSIS: A NEW
FREUD TRANSLATION
WILD ANALYSIS. By Sigmund Freud. Translated by Alan Bance with
an introduction by Adam Phillips. London: Penguin Books, 2002,
xxxii + 222 pp., $20.01.
Den eben wo Begriffe fehlen
Da stellt ein Wort zur rechten Zeit sich ein.
[Precisely where concepts fail you,
A timely word will come to mind.]
—GOETHE, Faust I:1995–1996
A new translation of Freud is a significant event because all translation
is also an interpretation, a rewriting, and inevitably, a betrayal.
Due to the inherently unsatisfactory nature of translation, when it
matters, many of us control the English translations of Freud against
the German original. Now we have a new resource to use and play
against, an accessible and vernacular postmodern Freud, under the
general editorship of Adam Phillips, who does not know German. Fifteen volumes
are planned; twelve have already been published. Phillips rejects
chronology for this series, proposing instead a thematic organization.
Each volume has a different translator, thus sacrificing the internal
consistency, excellent cross-referencing, and the more or less uniform
lexical use of language and style of the Strachey edition. The introductory
essays are all by nonpsychoanalysts—scholars of literature, the
history of science, and philosophy. The issue of Freud’s language
is pivotal because his ideas have shaped our twenty-first-century
perception of our world and of our humanity. His terms of reference
are now colloquial in the media and in our daily speech. How Freud is
translated determines how he is read and how his ideas are applied
clinically and in the culture. A colleague who was active in founding
a new psychoanalytic institute once argued: “Who needs to read
Freud on technique Physicists don’t read Einstein. Read the new stuff!”

Peter Loewenberg
I responded that I am not sure he is correct about physicists, but what
better would you have students in psychoanalysis read on the dynamics
of transference than Freud’s brief lucid early papers on technique
These are the papers that Phillips chose for the first volume of this
new Penguin Classics edition.
Over three decades ago Kurt Eissler (1971) elegantly made the
point that Freud’s genius is primarily linguistic:
A psychological explication of Freud’s genius will, I think, have to
center in his language. . . . I even anticipate the possibility that one day
someone will be able to demonstrate that what Freud presented to
the world in the organized form of his scientific papers—which seem
to contain the results of innumerable as well as of single observations,
of intensive meditation and deliberations, of subtle working through,
checking and counterchecking, comparing and returning over and over
again to the raw observational data that all this was in the end the refined
and scientifically correct presentation of what had been linguistically
performed earlier [p. 277].
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Paul Ricoeur (1977) invites us “to reflect upon the concept of
narrative intelligibility which psychoanalysis has in common with the
historical sciences” (p. 861). “In psychoanalysis the means of proof
reside in the very articulation of the entire network constituted by
theory, the interpretive procedures, the therapeutic treatment, and the
narrative structure of the analytic experience” (p. 865). Freud’s view on
psychoanalytic education also emphasizes the flexibility of a narrative
rehearsal: “The whole thing demands a certain measure of freedom of
movement and will not tolerate petty restrictions” (Freud 1926; my
translation); “Das Ganze erfordert aber ein gewisses Mass von
Bewegungsfreiheit und verträgt keine kleinlichen Beschränkungen”
(Studienausgabe, Ergänzungsband, S. 339; hereafter Stud., Erg.).
All anglophone psychoanalysts and writers who have studied Freud
have been nurtured on James Strachey’s Standard Edition (SE). The
Strachey translation, comprising some two million words, is magisterial,
but it is also, as noted on publication, and as decades of scholarship
and critique have demonstrated, seriously flawed. The tension and
contradictions inherent in Strachey’s aim as a translator are implicit in
his “General Preface” (1966) to the edition. Strachey recognized that
“Freud was a striking example of a man equally at home in both of what
have been called the ‘two cultures’. . . . he was also widely read in the
Greek and Latin classics as well as in the literatures of his own lan-

A NEW FREUD TRANSLATION
guage and in those of England, France, Italy and Spain” (p. xvi). Yet
Strachey made clear that his fantasied reader was explicitly culture,
time, and class specific: “The imaginary model I have always kept
before me is the writings of some English man of science of wide education
born in the middle of the nineteenth century. And I should like,
in an explanatory and no patriotic spirit, to emphasize the word
‘English’ ” (p. xix). Strachey was avowedly translating for a Victorian
gentleman, a Charles Darwin (1809–1882), Francis Galton (1822–
1911), or Thomas Huxley (1825–1895). For good reason the Strachey
edition is referred to with awe and disparagement as “the King James
Version.” John Forrester characterized it as “a cross between Thomas
Hardy and Julian Huxley” (quoted in Merkin 2003, p. 43).
Although he was familiar with the classical languages, Freud rarely
gave his concepts Greek and Latin names. He preferred ordinary spoken
German and occasionally modern English or French. Strachey,
of Cambridge and Bloomsbury, Latinized and Hellenized Freud’s
vigorous, often colloquial, German. As Bettelheim (1983) polemically
but usefully pointed out, in the Standard Edition the word Besetzung
needlessly became Hellenized as cathexis when it more accurately
should be occupies; Abwehr became defence when it could better have
been fending off or parrying; Fehlleistung became a combination of
Greek words, parapraxis, when a more correct and smoother usage
for the reader would be lapse or slip (pp. 84–91). D. J. Fisher (2005)
persuasively argues that “Freud’s language was explicitly chosen to
sound an intimate note, . . . he built theory in order to strike his audience’s
private register. . . . reading Freud ought to invite a process of
familiarity, akin to the spontaneous, empathic feelings of closeness
experienced in confronting the human in oneself” (p. 35).
Freud’s humanistic language was given a positivistic, empiricist,
nineteenth-century natural science turn by Strachey: geisteswissenschaftlichen
Stoff and Geisteswissenschaft (Stud., Erg., Ss. 343, 348) are
widely used and well known in the germanophone world to mean
humanistic science. These strategic terms fully lose the distinction
between humanism and natural science when they are mistranslated
by Strachey as the mental sciences (SE 20:252, 257). This is no coincidence:
the emotional nuances, the kinesthetic, imagistic, and metaphorical
quality of the unconscious, are lost when analysis becomes a
dispassionate, mechanistic scientific project to objectively distance and
dissect. Strachey’s apparent intent was to transform psychoanalysis
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from a hermeneutic of emotions to a medico-biological natural science
with rigidly fixed structures. As Marjorie Brierley (1965) noted in
her critique upon the publication of the Standard Edition,
On occasion the psychic systems have been treated as far too rigid
entities. But these systems are organizations of living processes, which
can have more or less enduring patterns but no structure in the
architectural sense. Structure, used of the psyche, is a metaphor. . . .
Clearly, if the psychic organizations were rigid, unmodifiable ‘‘structures”
Freud’s summary of the aim of therapy ‘‘Where id was, there ego
shall be’’ could have no meaning [pp. 253–253].
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Freud’s models of the mind were, as Ornston (1985) says, “his way of
imagining what goes on unconsciously” (p. 408).
Freud never limited the scope of psychoanalysis to being a subspecialty
of psychiatry. As translator Alan Bance writes, “His vision of
psychoanalysis extending into all realms of cultural and intellectual life
has been realized” (p. xxxii). The Phillips/Bance version is modern in
its translation of Freud’s suggestive and very contemporary technological
metaphor for listening to the unconscious: “Er soll dem gebenden
Unbewussten des Kranken sein eigenes Unbewusstes als empfangendes
Organ zuwenden, sich auf den Analysierten einstellen wie der Receiver
des Telephons zum Teller eingestellt ist” (Stud., Erg., S. 339). Strachey
translates this as “he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive
organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient. He must
adjust himself to the patient as a telephone receiver is adjusted to the
transmitting microphone” (SE 12:115–116). Phillips/Bance uses attachment
theory idioms: “attuning himself to the analysand as the receiver
of a telephone is attuned to the disc” (p. 37). The Phillips/Bance translation
deliberately invokes the current clinical language of empathic
attunement. Freud often used figures of speech and expressions derived
from military combat to capture active kinesthetic images of the clinical
struggle with neurosis. The feeling tone and the psychodynamics
in Freud’s original terms are important because the connotations
convey a dynamic rather than a passive concept, which has been distorted
in translation. In war Verdrängung is the active dislodging of
the enemy. In nautical engineering it means the vessel’s displacement
of water. “Repression” suggests a direction, holding something down.
Freud (1915) explicitly stressed that repression implies no direction:
“ihr Wesen nur in der Abweissung und Fernhaltung vom Bewusstsen
besteht”; “its essence lies only in dismissal and keeping at a distance

A NEW FREUD TRANSLATION
from the conscious” (Stud., III, 108; my translation). In Strachey’s
passive voice, this becomes: “the essence of repression lies simply in
turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious”
(SE 14:147). Freud’s vigorous kinesthetic injunction of how
to handle the analysand’s refusal to free associate is in the military
idiom of a resistance that has moved to the front and must be physically
struck down: “Ein starker Widerstand is da in die Front gerückt,
um die Neurose zu verteidigen; man nehme die Herausforderung sofort
an und rücke ihm an den Leib” (Stud., Erg., S. 197). Strachey softly
says “come to grips with it” (SE 12:137). Phillips/Bance is more faithful
to the original when it expresses it as “move in for close combat”
(p. 57). When Freud talked of his concern about the dominance of
therapy over science in psychoanalysis he used erschlägt (Stud.,
Erg., S. 345), a powerful irregular intransitive verb meaning beaten to
death in personal combat, war, or adversarial fighting such as litigation.
Strachey softens this to “therapy will not destroy the science”
(SE 20:254). Phillips/Bance is closer to the immediacy of combat, but
still kinesthetically distant, with “the therapy should be prevented from
killing off the science” (p. 166).
It is a daunting challenge to translate Freud’s unpretentious,
sometimes earthy, vigorous language and the pungency of his imagery.
Strachey covers Freud’s immediacy with gentility. Phillips/Bance
regains some of Freud’s direct colloquial simplicity. In writing of an
impaired I (Ego), which Freud here concretizes and personifies, he
says it is as though the I were walking through unfamiliar terrain and is
nicht rüstig, meaning not hearty or strong (Stud., Erg., S. 377). Strachey
makes this “without having a good pair of legs” (SE 23:237).
Phillips/Bance turns this to “are not very sprightly on your legs”
(p. 193). Freud held that a single wrong interpretation was harmlos
(Stud., Erg., S. 399). Strachey made this “can do no harm” (SE 23:237).
Phillips/Bance simply restores “harmless” (p. 215). When Freud writes
of the analysand’s unconscious tactic of dividing the treatment into an
official therapeutic “work” part and an informal “chat” portion in which
patients speak freely and disclose many things which they regard as
not part of the analysis, he uses the common German expression
gemütlichen (Stud., Erg., S.198). Strachey translates gemütlich as “informal”
or “friendly” (SE 12:139), but Phillips/Bance uses an appropriate
colloquial English “cosy” (p. 59).Strachey regularly alters Freud’s
immediacy of the present tense to the weaker past tense. Freud wrote
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about childhood repression using an irregular intransitive verb: “die
entscheidenden Verdrängungen vorgefallen sind” (Stud., Erg., S. 300);
in Strachey this becomes passive: “the decisive repressions have taken
place then . . .” (SE 20:209). Thus, what Freud describes as a dynamic
process becomes a structure in Strachey. Phillips/Bance restores Freud’s
active voice: “the decisive repressions occur” (p. 118).
In some cases the Strachey translation is literally more accurate, a
critical value for scholarship. Freud’s discussion of those lay persons
who place feelings of love on an idealized besonderen Blatte (Stud.,
Erg., S. 219) is accurately “special page” in Strachey (SE 12:160) and
more elegantly “a special parchment” in Phillips/Bance (p. 68). Freud’s
direct and forceful German banalen Unlustgefühles (Stud., Erg., S.
161, n.1) becomes “ordinary feelings of unpleasure” in Strachey (SE
12:101, n.1) and a looser, less accurate, but more colloquial “trivial
feeling of unwillingness” in Phillips/Bance (p. 29, n.4). What Freud
termed der Zeitlosigkeit und der Halluzinationsfähigkeit des
Unbewussten (Stud., Erg., S.167) is accurately translated by Strachey
as “The timelessness of the unconscious and its capacity for hallucination”
(SE 12:108). In Phillips/Bance this awkwardly becomes
“the ‘time-free’ nature and the hallucinatory power of the unconscious”
(p. 28).
A translation can never be more than an approximation. We must
acknowledge that there is no “true” Freud. Each generation will retranslate
and reinterpret these texts in accord with its age, needs, and
experience. As Daniel Lagache (1967) argued, “words, like ideas (and
together with ideas), are not merely created—they have a fate: they may
fall into disuse or lose their currency, giving way to others which are
better suited to the needs of fresh orientations in research and theory”
(p. viii). Our historical, cultural, and psychoanalytic moment is radically
different from that of Strachey half a century ago. Freud occupies
a pivotal position in the contemporary humanist cultural hermeneutic
canon. We need a Freud who speaks directly to us and to our time. The
Phillips/Bance Freud is more cultural, literary, historical, and anthropological,
and less committed to establishing the positivistic empirical
scientific validity of psychoanalysis, than was the Strachey edition.
This new translation of Freud is welcome because it offers, to clinicians,
general informed readers, students, and researchers, new
options—in this case, colloquial ordinary English truer to Freud’s
direct ordinary German—and is more attuned to contemporary psycho-

A NEW FREUD TRANSLATION
analytic theoretical and clinical concerns and usage. Unfortunately,
the utility of the new translation is substantially weakened by the
absence of an index.
REFERENCES
BETTELHEIM, B. (1983). Freud and Man’s Soul. New York: Knopf.
BRANDT, L.W. (1961). Some notes on English Freudian terminology, Journal
of the American Psychoanalytic Association 9:331–339.
BRIERLEY, M. (1965). Review of SE XIX and XXII. International Journal
of Psychoanalysis 46:251–254.
EISSLER, K. (1971). Talent and Genius: The Fictitious Case of Tausk contra
Freud. New York: Quadrangle Books.
FISHER, D.J. (2005). Bettelheim: Living and Dying. Unpublished manuscript.
FREUD, S. (1915). Die Verdrängung. Studienausgabe III. Frankfurt am Main:
S. Fischer Verlag, 1975.
——— (1926). Die Frage der Laienanalyse. Studienausgabe, Ergänzungsband,
271–341. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1975.
LAGACHE, D. (1967). Introduction: The origins and history of this work.
In J. Laplanche & J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis,
transl. D. Nicholson-Smith. New York: Norton, 1973, pp. vii–ix.
MERKIN, D. (2003). The literary Freud. New York Times Magazine, July 13,
2003, pp. 40–44.
ORNSTON, D. (1985). Freud’s conception is different from Strachey’s.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 33:379–412.
RICOEUR, P. (1977). The question of proof in Freud’s psychoanalytic writings.
Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 25:835–871.
STRACHEY, J. (1966). General preface. Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. J. Strachey. London:
Hogarth Press, vol. 1, pp. xiii–xxi.
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Peter Loewenberg
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