ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the rhetorical effect of translating terms differentially in English and French translations of Sigmund Freud's work. When translators are intent on proving that Freud was a systematic thinker, they tend not to translate his terms differentially. Psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche (1924–2012), student of Jacques Lacan and translator of Sigmund Freud's work into French, agreed with his teacher that a more consistent translation of Nachträglichkeit (as “afterwardsness” in English and après-coup in French) is necessary since the term designates Freud's insight that trauma does not immediately arise from traumatic experience, but from later experiences that trigger the repressed memory. The second part of the chapter discusses the aims, execution, and reception of the New Penguin Freud translations and argues that these translations, which treat Nachträglichkeit differentially, do better justice to the term than did past translations, but also that the New Penguin series could only have been conceived at its own belated moment in the translation history of Freud's work: in the early twenty-first century, “after the Freud Wars,” as series editor Adam Phillips put it.
