ABSTRACT
The Standard Edition of Freud’s work is a unique instrument which allowed, and is still allowing, the English-speaking reader to know Freud. But it is also a unique example in the history of translation and transmission of ideas from one culture to another.
In this chapter, I study the cultural and the socio-political context which leads to the first systematic attempts to translate Freud by A. Brill, E. Jones, and others in America in the first decade of the last century, and later by J. Riviere, James, and A. Strachey in England in the early 1920s. They lead to the publication of the SE during the 50s and 60s.
The uniqueness, even of the first systematic attempts to translate Freud, is due to the enormous emotional conscious and unconscious problems related to the way the translators interacted with Freud. They all in various ways used the attempt to translate Freud to have a privileged contact and a sort of analysis with him. Using the available correspondence, the author shows this unique and peculiar interaction. Brill and Jones never had a proper analysis with Freud, neither by letter nor during some personal meetings with him at congresses and in Vienna. Joan Riviere and Alex and James Strachey went to Vienna to be analyzed by him and, at the same time, to try to better understand how to translate him.
The sibling rivalry between all those people and the wish to possess Freud through translating him led to the strange tragicomic results and reactions: breakdowns as in the case of A. Brill, E. Jones, and their terrible rivalry, as in the case of Jones and Joan Riviere protected by Freud in Vienna. The Stracheys were also affected if one thinks of the situation in which they had to discuss their translation with Freud on a Sunday afternoon after having been both analyzed by him during the week. The role played by Freud in these complex situations can also not be denied.
It is suggested that all those unresolved transferences and wish fulfilments played a part in shaping the translations even later on. The use of such alien terms as cathexis and anaclitic to translate beseztung and ahnlenung could be also seen as an attempt to reverse the dependency on Freud and to make him dependent on the choices of his translators and the distorted image they wanted to create. This is particularly so in the case of Ernest Jones and James Strachey.
In the last part of the paper, the author touches on the issue of what psychoanalysis could bring to the theory of translation in general using what is described in this paper as an example. The personal unconscious projections or projective identification of the translator cannot be ignored, and they lead us to better understand what scholars, writers, and translators have known for thousands of years in Western culture, namely, that the traduttore is inevitably a traditore.
