Sacred Psychoanalysis - etheses Repository - University of ...

photocopies were accessed from the Freud Archive held at the American Library of
Congress, Washington D.C. In collaboration with Dr Ruth Whittle and Dr Elystan Griffiths,
some of these letters were translated. 572
The results of this research were four-fold. Firstly, Anna Freud had edited a small number
of New Year’s greetings that Freud routinely sent, and a postcard from Freud’s trip to the
USA in 1909, also signed by Jung, one of Pfister’s colleagues in Zurich.
Secondly, several of the edited extracts related to a period around 1912 when Pfister was
contemplating a divorce. This would have been a scandalous event especially for a minister
of religion. Freud was concerned about the reputation of psychoanalysis, as the press in
Zurich had already published critical comments about Freud’s ideas on sex. However he
was fully supportive of Pfister and wished to support him, whatever the outcome.
Thirdly, most of the edited letters related to a particular patient, Frau H, who had uniquely
been treated by Jung, Pfister and Freud. This case Freud viewed as one of his failures, and
Falzeder identified that each analyst was using a different letter, Frau C (Jung), Frau H
(Pfister) and Frau A (Freud) for the same person (Falzeder 1994). In hindsight this patient
and her treatment, on the basis of information recorded, illustrates the power of countertransference
in a way that was not developed in psychoanalysis until the 1950s (Winnicott
1949; Heimann 1950, 1956). This patient and her treatment formed one of the differences
of opinion leading to the later split between Freud and Jung.
Fourthly, Whittle and Griffiths’ draft translations noted a stylistic change in Freud’s writing
when he touched on religious themes to Pfister. His clear structured use of language and
sentence construction became much looser and more hesitant. Solms examines why
translation is of such importance to psychoanalysis.
From this point of view, Freud was in fact the first psychoanalytic translator. And
we, the translators of Freud, do not only face the problem of finding the best words
in our own language to match the German words that Freud used; far more
importantly, we are faced with the problem of finding the best figurative language to
describe those ‘unknowable’ things occurring inside us, which can never be
perceived directly, and which Freud was the first to describe. Under these
circumstances, … we are all (Freud no less than his translators) groping in the
darkness (Solms 1999: 39f.). 573
572 Members of staff in the Department of German Studies, University of Birmingham. I obtained an award
from the Dean’s Special Initiative Fund (2005) that funded these initial translations.
573 A preceding part of this quotation is as follows, ‘Freud is drawing attention to a problem which lies at the
very heart of psychoanalytic translation, and indeed at the very heart of psychoanalysis itself. He says that if
we did not use figurative language to describe the processes that occur deep inside us, then not only would we
never describe these processes at all, we could never even become aware of them … the processes which
concern us most directly in psychoanalysis – namely unconscious mental processes – do not have any
perceptual qualities. We can never see, hear, feel or touch the things that are going on at the deepest level of
our souls … And in psychoanalysis … we ‘become aware’ of unconscious mental processes by attaching
words to them. To that extent the very aim of psychoanalysis is to engage in the process of translation …
which ultimately reveals our inner nature … In my view, herein lies the nub of the unique problems of
translation that we face in psychoanalysis: in psychoanalysis we are compelled to find words to describe things
that we can never know directly, things that we can never perceive …’ (Solms 1999: 38).
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