venuti

26 The Translator’s Invisibilityinconsistency is underscored not only by Freud’s heavy reliance onanecdotal, “everyday” examples, some—as above—taken from hisown experience, but also by a footnote added to a later edition ofthe German text and included in the English translation: “This bookis of an entirely popular character; it merely aims, by anaccumulation of examples, at paving the way for the necessaryassumption of unconscious yet operative mental processes, and itavoids all theoretical considerations on the nature of theunconscious” (Freud 1960:272n.). James Strachey himselfunwittingly called attention to the inconsistent diction in his prefaceto Alan Tyson’s translation, where he felt it necessary to provide arationale for the use of “parapraxis”: “In German ‘Fehlleistung,’‘faulty function.’ It is a curious fact that before Freud wrote this bookthe general concept seems not to have existed in psychology, and inEnglish a new word had to be invented to cover it” (Freud1960:viiin.). It can of course be objected (against Bettelheim) that themixture of specialized scientific terms and commonly used dictionis characteristic of Freud’s German, and therefore (against me) thatthe English translation in itself cannot be the basis for an account ofthe translators’ strategy. Yet although I am very much in agreementwith the first point, the second weakens when we realize that evena comparison between the English versions of key Freudian termseasily demonstrates the inconsistency in kinds of diction I havelocated in the translated passage: “id” vs. “unconscious”; “cathexis”vs. “charge,” or “energy”; “libidinal” vs. “sexual.”Bettelheim suggests some of the determinations that shaped thescientistic translation strategy of the Standard Edition. One importantconsideration 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 ahermeneutic—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 whichthis tradition was entrenched and against which psychoanalysis hadto struggle in order to gain acceptance in the post-World War II period.As Bettelheim concisely puts it, “psychological research and teachingin American universities are either behaviorally, cognitively, orphysiologically oriented and concentrate almost exclusively on whatcan be measured or observed from the outside” (ibid.:19). Forpsychoanalysis this meant that its assimilation in Anglo-American