venuti

Invisibility 27culture entailed a redefinition, in which it “was perceived in theUnited States as a practice that ought to be the sole prerogative ofphysicians” (ibid.:33), “a medical specialty” (ibid.:35), and thisredefinition was carried out in a variety of social practices, includingnot only legislation by state assemblies and certification by thepsychoanalytic profession, but the scientistic translation of theStandard Edition:When Freud appears to be either more abstruse or more dogmatic inEnglish translation than in the original German, to speak aboutabstract concepts rather than about the reader himself, and aboutman’s mind rather than about his soul, the probable explanationisn’t mischievousness or carelessness on the translators’ part but adeliberate wish to perceive Freud strictly within the framework ofmedicine.(ibid.:32)The domesticating method at work in the translations of the StandardEdition sought to assimilate Freud’s texts to the dominance ofpositivism in Anglo-American culture so as to facilitate theinstitutionalization of psychoanalysis in the medical profession and inacademic psychology.Bettelheim’s book is of course couched in the most judgmentalof terms, and it is his negative judgment that must be avoided (orperhaps rethought) if we want to understand the manifoldsignificance of the Standard Edition as a translation. Bettelheimviews the work of Strachey and his collaborators as a distortionand a betrayal of Freud’s “essential humanism,” a view that pointsto a valorization of a concept of the transcendental subject in bothBettelheim and Freud. Bettelheim’s assessment of thepsychoanalytic project is stated in his own humanistic versions forthe Standard Edition’s “ego,” “id,” and “superego”: “A reasonabledominance of our I over our it and above-I—this was Freud’s goalfor all of us” (Bettleheim 1983:110). This notion of ego dominanceconceives of the subject as the potentially self-consistent source ofits knowledge and actions, not perpetually split by psychological(“id”) and social (“superego”) determinations over which it has noor limited control. The same assumption can often be seen inFreud’s German text: not only in his emphasis on socialadjustment, for instance, as with the concept of the “realityprinciple,” but also in his repeated use of his own experience for