The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

26 The Translator’s Invisibility
inconsistency is underscored not only by Freud’s heavy reliance on
anecdotal, “everyday” examples, some—as above—taken from his
own experience, but also by a footnote added to a later edition of
the German text and included in the English translation: “This book
is of an entirely popular character; it merely aims, by an
accumulation of examples, at paving the way for the necessary
assumption of unconscious yet operative mental processes, and it
avoids all theoretical considerations on the nature of the
unconscious” (Freud 1960:272n.). James Strachey himself
unwittingly called attention to the inconsistent diction in his preface
to Alan Tyson’s translation, where he felt it necessary to provide a
rationale for the use of “parapraxis”: “In German ‘Fehlleistung,’
‘faulty function.’ It is a curious fact that before Freud wrote this book
the general concept seems not to have existed in psychology, and in
English a new word had to be invented to cover it” (Freud
1960:viiin.). It can of course be objected (against Bettelheim) that the
mixture of specialized scientific terms and commonly used diction
is characteristic of Freud’s German, and therefore (against me) that
the English translation in itself cannot be the basis for an account of
the translators’ strategy. Yet although I am very much in agreement
with the first point, the second weakens when we realize that even
a comparison between the English versions of key Freudian terms
easily demonstrates the inconsistency in kinds of diction I have
located in the translated passage: “id” vs. “unconscious”; “cathexis”
vs. “charge,” or “energy”; “libidinal” vs. “sexual.”
Bettelheim suggests some of the determinations that shaped the
scientistic translation strategy of the Standard Edition. One important
consideration is the intellectual current that has dominated Anglo-
American psychology and philosophy since the eighteenth century:
“In theory, many topics with which Freud dealt permit both a
hermeneutic—spiritual and a positivistic—pragmatic approach.
When this is so, the English translators nearly always opt for the latter,
positivism being the most important English philosophical tradition”
(Bettelheim 1983:44). But there are also the social institutions in which
this tradition was entrenched and against which psychoanalysis had
to struggle in order to gain acceptance in the post-World War II period.
As Bettelheim concisely puts it, “psychological research and teaching
in American universities are either behaviorally, cognitively, or
physiologically oriented and concentrate almost exclusively on what
can be measured or observed from the outside” (ibid.:19). For
psychoanalysis this meant that its assimilation in Anglo-American