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 {27} culture entailed a redefinition, in which it “was perceived in the United States as a practice that ought to be the sole prerogative of physicians” (ibid.:33), “a medical specialty” (ibid.:35), and this redefinition was carried out in a variety of social practices, including not only legislation by state assemblies and certification by the psychoanalytic profession, but the scientistic translation of the Standard Edition:
When Freud appears to be either more abstruse or more dogmatic in English translation than in the original German, to speak about abstract concepts rather than about the reader himself, and about man’s mind rather than about his soul, the probable explanation isn’t mischievousness or carelessness on the translators’ part but a deliberate wish to perceive Freud strictly within the framework of medicine.
The domesticating method at work in the translations of the Standard Edition sought to assimilate Freud’s texts to the dominance of positivism in Anglo-American culture so as to facilitate the institutionalization of psychoanalysis in the medical profession and in academic psychology.
Bettelheim’s book is of course couched in the most judgmental of terms, and it is his negative judgment that must be avoided (or perhaps rethought) if we want to understand the manifold significance of the Standard Edition as a translation. Bettelheim views the work of Strachey and his collaborators as a distortion and a betrayal of Freud’s “essential humanism,” a view that points to a valorization of a concept of the transcendental subject in both Bettelheim and Freud. Bettelheim’s assessment of the psychoanalytic project is stated in his own humanistic versions for the Standard Edition’s “ego,” “id,” and “superego”: “A reasonable dominance of our I over our it and above-I—this was Freud’s goal for all of us” (Bettleheim 1983:110). This notion of ego dominance conceives of the subject as the potentially self-consistent source of its knowledge and actions, not perpetually split by psychological (“id”) and social (“superego”) determinations over which it has no or limited control. The same assumption can often be seen in Freud’s German text: not only in his emphasis on social adjustment, for instance, as with the concept of the “reality principle,” but also in his repeated use of his own experience for {28} analysis; both represent the subject as healing the determinate split in its own consciousness. Yet insofar as Freud’s various psychic models theorized the ever-present, contradictory determinations of consciousness, the effect of his work was to decenter the subject, to remove it from a transcendental realm of freedom and unity and view it as the determinate product of psychic and familial forces beyond its conscious control. These conflicting concepts of the subject underlie different aspects of Freud’s project: the transcendental subject, on the one hand, leads to a definition of psychoanalysis as primarily therapeutic, what Bettelheim calls a “demanding and potentially dangerous voyage of self-discovery […] so that we may no longer be enslaved without knowing it to the dark forces that reside in us” (ibid.:4); the determinate subject, on the other hand, leads to a definition of psychoanalysis as primarily hermeneutic, a theoretical apparatus with sufficient scientific rigor to analyze the shifting but always active forces that constitute and divide human subjectivity. Freud’s texts are thus marked by a fundamental discontinuity, one which is “resolved” in Bettelheim’s humanistic representation of psychoanalysis as compassionate therapy, but which is exacerbated by the scientistic strategy of the English translations and their representation of Freud as the coolly analyzing physician.[11] The inconsistent diction in the Standard Edition, by reflecting the positivistic redefinition of psychoanalysis in Anglo-American institutions, signifies another, alternative reading of Freud that heightens the contradictions in his project.
It can be argued, therefore, that the inconsistent diction in the English translations does not really deserve to be judged erroneous; on the contrary, it discloses interpretive choices determined by a wide range of social institutions and cultural movements, some (like the specific institutionalization of psychoanalysis) calculated by the translators, others (like the dominance of positivism and the discontinuities in Freud’s texts) remaining dimly perceived or entirely unconscious during the translation process. The fact that the inconsistencies have gone unnoticed for so long is perhaps largely the result of two mutually determining factors: the privileged status accorded the Standard Edition among English-language readers and the entrenchment of a positivistic reading of Freud in the Anglo-American psychoanalytic establishment. Hence, a different critical approach with a different set of assumptions becomes necessary to perceive the inconsistent diction of the translations: Bettelheim’s {29} particular humanism, or my own attempt to ground a symptomatic reading of translated texts on a foreignizing method of translation that assumes a determinate concept of subjectivity. This sort of reading can be said to foreignize a domesticating translation by showing where it is discontinuous; a translation’s dependence on dominant values in the target-language culture becomes most visible where it departs from them. Yet this reading also uncovers the domesticating movement involved in any foreignizing translation by showing where its construction of the foreign depends on domestic cultural materials.
[11]
The same contradiction appears in Freud’s own reflections on the therapeutic/hermeneutic dilemma of psychoanalysis in
Twenty-five years of intense work have had as their result that the immediate aims of psychoanalytic technique are other today than they were at the outset. At first the analyzing physician could do no more than discover the unconscious material that was concealed from the patient, put it together, and, at the right moment, communicate it to him. Psychoanalysis was then first and foremost an art of interpreting. Since this did not solve the therapeutic problem, a further aim quickly came in view: to oblige the patient to confirm the analyst’s construction from his own memory. In that endeavor the chief emphasis lay upon the patient’s resistances: the art consisted now in uncovering these as quickly as possible, in pointing them out to the patient and in inducing him by human influence—this was where suggestion operating as “transference” played its part—to abandon his resistances.
Although Freud intends to draw a sharp distinction in the development of psychoanalysis between an early, hermeneutic phase and a later, therapeutic phase, his exposition really blurs the distinction: both phases require a primary emphasis on interpretation, whether of “unconscious material” or of “the patient’s resistances,” which insofar as they require “uncovering” are likewise “unconscious”; in both “the analyst’s construction” can be said to be “first and foremost.” What has changed is
not so much “the immediate aims of psychoanalytic technique” as its theoretical apparatus: the intervening years witnessed the development of a new
The English translations cleave to an early stage of Freud’s thought, in which he inclined toward science and medicine, and disregard the more mature Freud, whose orientation was humanistic, and who was concerned mostly with broadly conceived cultural and human problems and with matters of the soul.