It may surprise readers of the ''Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud'' to find that its chief editor, James Strachey, and his collaborators (including his co-editor, Anna Freud) are here made responsible for the failure of American psychoanalysis....
In any translation there is a drift away from the tone and even the sense of the original, and this drift is likely to be stronger when the text is treasured by an institution that is split by doctrinal and national disagreement; as in theology, key terms acquire incompatible definitions. Moreover, the German language has the trick of making up new terms out of its own substance; lacking this capability, English has usually resorted to neologisms made from Greek and Latin roots. To Dr. Bettelheim such words look affectedly learned, and sometimes they are. Strachey should not have translated ''Mutterleib'' as ''uterus''; ''womb'' is better. ''Unheil'' is not ''trouble'' but ''disaster.'' ''Masse'' doesn't mean ''group'' -it simply means ''mass'' - and so an important book, ''Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,'' has a mistranslated title. Worse still, ''Trieb'' does not mean ''instinct''; Strachey hesitated over the word, disliking ''drive,'' but he should have seen that ''instinct'' was worse. ''Triebe und Triebschicksale'' simply doesn't mean ''Instincts and Their Vicissitudes,'' though Dr. Bettelheim's ''Drives and Their Mutability'' is only slightly better. Perhaps ''Drives and Their Vicissitudes'' would be the best compromise.
He insists that Freud was always trying to avoid technical words, so that it is a distortion to make him sound technical in a translation. For example, ''Besetzung,'' which means ''occupation'' or ''investment'' or ''filling'' in ordinary German, is translated as ''cathexis.'' But granted the English habit of making up words from Greek, ''cathexis'' means ''occupation,'' in what is obviously a special sense. And it must surely have a special sense in Freud. He also uses ''Uberbesetzung''; not, I am told, a common word. Is ''hypercathexis'' really more bizarre than ''over-occupation'' or ''upper-occupation''?
ASIMILAR point arises with Freud's word ''Fehlleistung,'' a combination of two ordinary words that means something like ''faulty achievement.'' Freud used it (pace Dr. Bettelheim) as a technical term, covering acts or speech-acts in which the unconscious enters to prevent our doing what we set out to achieve. Strachey translated ''Fehlleistung'' as ''parapraxis,'' which is rather brilliant and conveys the sense of Freud's word better than the clumsy circumlocution that would have otherwise been necessary. Dr. Bettelheim says he has never heard anybody say ''parapraxis,'' which is odd, since I hear the word often and use it myself. It might be thought of as Strachey's little contribution to the tradition of classical culture in which Dr. Bettelheim wishes we were educated. But such praise is not to be expected here. Strachey is even blamed for translating ''Versprechen'' as ''slips of the tongue,'' though it is an expression far older than Freud and an exact equivalent of the Latin ''lapsus linguae,'' which Freud himself could have used. Dr. Bettelheim says fancifully that Strachey was making the tongue responsible for the error, which is simply to misread the idiom.
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But the substance of Dr. Bettelheim's complaint is suggested by his book's title. Freud used the word ''Seele'' very freely: ''A dream is the result of the activity of our own soul''; ''the structure of the soul''; ''the life of the soul.'' Strachey avoided the word, always translating it as ''mind'' and ''Seelische'' as ''mental.'' He must have known that this was inaccurate; his problem, as usual, was the different semantic range of the words ''Seele'' and ''soul.'' It would be disastrous to say in English ''psychoanalysis is a part of psychology which is dedicated to the science of the soul''; Strachey said ''part of the mental science of psychology,'' which is bad but lacks the religious, or religiose, overtones of the more literal version. Perhaps he should have used ''psyche'' and ''psychic,'' but there are obvious dangers in those words too. Dr. Bettelheim's observations are here more justifiable, but perhaps he should address his complaints to Babel rather than to Strachey; some of these problems are inherent in the diversity of languages and cultures.
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