The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud Edited by MarkSolms in Collaboration With Ilse Gubrich‐SimitisRowman and Littlefield and the Institute of Psychoanalysis8144 pp. in 24 volumes $1950.00 (Hardbound and E

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (SE), published in 24 volumes issued intermittently between 1953 and 1974 and “translated from the German under the General Editorship of James Strachey,” was praised from the beginning for its comprehensive scholarship that was valued even by German experts. In fact, it easily became its titular “standard” reference source for Anglophone scholars of Freud and psychoanalysis. But also from the beginning and even as its scholarly virtues were being acknowledged, critical voices from several bilingual German/English readers arose complaining that Strachey's translations tended to overly “scientize” Freud's original clear and down-to-earth language, sometimes replacing it with more abstract and often neologistic Latin- and Greek-based terminology. Something of a cottage industry of works criticizing the translations arose, perhaps most vehemently expressed in Bruno Bettelheim's 1983 Freud and Man's Soul, and more temperately summarized and discussed in Darius Ornston's 1992 Translating Freud. In the meantime the SE's publishers, cognizant of constantly ongoing Freud scholarship and perhaps also motivated by the volumes' pending copyright expirations, initiated plans to prepare a revised edition. In 1991 Albert Dickson was appointed its first general Editor, replaced in 1995 by the psychoanalyst and trained neuroscientist Mark Solms. Solms is also notable for his establishment and ongoing leadership in “Neuropsychoanalysis”—a movement to integrate psychoanalytic insights with modern neurology. Now after nearly three decades of intensive scholarship, the massive Revised Standard Edition (RSE) has finally come to fruition—soon to be complemented by a four-volumed Complete Neuroscientific Works of Sigmund Freud (NSW), most of them translated into English for the first time by Solms. The publishers have made available to me just four review copies of Volumes 1, 7, 22, and 24, all in pdf format. The first and last are essential because Volume 1 contains an explanatory Preface outlining the major decisions and guidelines Solms followed in conducting the entire series, and Volume 24 contains extended “Notes on the Translation” describing and defending his specific policies regarding the controversies surrounding Strachey's translation practices. Volume 7 contains foundational works from Freud's early theorizing on sexuality, and Volume 22 features several of his late works including New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Solms's opening Preface to the RSE declares that “The single most important principle upon which this revision is based is the decision to retain Strachey's SE translations—that is, to revise the translations rather than replace them” (Vol. 1, p. xxv). His rationale for this decision is detailed in the above mentioned “Notes on the Translation” in Volume 24. There he argues that every translator from one language to another faces an inevitable question of aiming either to “faithfully reproduce the conventions of the ‘source’ language (the one being translated from) or follow those of the ‘target’ language (the one being translated into).” Whichever choice one makes, “something is lost either way.” The standard French translations of Freud have opted for the former choice, Solms notes, whereas Strachey explicitly opted to present Freud for an “English man of science of wide education born in the middle of the nineteenth century” (Vol. 24, p. 45). This target reader was generally comparable to the German audience for whom Freud intended his publications, and Freud himself agreed with Strachey's making of this choice. In discussing this choice, Solms emphasizes that in general German scientific language is more down to earth and less abstract than its English counterpart. The Greek-derived English words hydrogen and oxygen, for example, are simply Wasserstoff (“water stuff”) and Sauerstoff (“sour stuff”) in German. In Freud's early field of neuroanatomy, the brain structure called Brücke (“bridge”) in German becomes pons in English; the Vierhügel (“four hills”) become corpora quadrigemina; and the Kleinhirn (“little brain”) is the cerebellum. In these typical instances Solms notes, “the German scientific term is an everyday, descriptive one, while the English equivalent is a neologism derived from the ancients” (p. 44). This same distinction often applied in more philosophical discourse, as in the important example that, long before Freud, a German concept of das Ich (literally “the I”) was routinely translated into English as the ego. After approving the reasonableness of Strachey's trade-off in providing an “English style” translation of Freud's German, Solms goes on at length to inform readers of exactly the kinds of losses that the trade-off has entailed. He provides an extended discussion and summary of the major criticisms and reservations that have been expressed about the original SE, concluding with a systematic list and discussion of more than 100 of Freud's most contested German terms, in alphabetical order from abfliessen to Zwangsvorstellung. Just a few examples will have to suffice to represent some of these terms. Freud's Traumdeutung has famously been translated as Dream [Traum] “Interpretation” [Deutung]. In fact, Freud chose not to use the German word directly cognate to “interpretation” in favor of Deutung, which carries the important extra connotation of being an “attempt to grasp the deeper meaning or significance of something” (p. 62). Strachey notoriously created Greek-derived neologisms for several original Freudian terms, including the much-critiqued invention of “cathexis” to translate Freud's everyday term Besetzung. The German word has numerous English meanings including occupation, investment, engagement, filling up or charge—and was first used by Freud to denote the varying levels of excitement or energic potential within individual neurons. Later it came to refer to the arousal or “primed” states of individual ideas. Strachey derived his new term “cathexis” from the ancient Greek catechein (“to occupy”), which of course conveys none of the important everyday connotations of Besetzung. In a somewhat similar example, Freud's early popular book The Psychopathology of Everyday Life focused on behaviors he called Fehlleistungen, a word he constructed from the everyday German terms for “false” (Fehl) and “accomplishment” (Leistung). Strachey translated this with the Greek-derived and far from everyday-seeming “parapraxis.” Readers of the work have provided the more apt and popular rendition of parapraxes as the famous “Freudian slips.” In another widely criticized practice Strachey used the same word “associations” to translate the two entirely different German words, Assoziationen and Einfällen. The former denotes the kinds of “everyday” associated ideas that “make sense” and come to mind quite easily and logically. The latter, by contrast, are ideas that suddenly and unexpectedly come to mind “out of the blue” and without obviously apparent linkage to the ongoing train of thought. Freud found these kinds of mental events to be particularly significant in analyzing his patients' (and his own) dreams by the method of free association. Many of these criticisms and controversies will already be known to serious Freud scholars, and most were forthrightly acknowledged by Strachey himself in notes and introductory comments when first using them. But it is useful to have them systematically summarized here, and perusal of the list can be a salutary experience for any non-German speaking Anglophone reader. It will clearly demonstrate that however parallel the abstract concepts of psychoanalysis may be for English and German readers of Freud, the overall “mental images” and associations to those concepts will inevitably be quite different for the two groups. Structurally, the RSE is identical to its predecessor, with the first 23 chronologically ordered volumes bearing the same titles and all of the older content, including Strachey's introductions and commentaries (with the exception of just seven items that have been relocated to different volumes because of new dating information). Virtually all of Strachey's original content is retained and reproduced intact with just two exceptions. First, because there was nearly universal agreement that Strachey's translation of Freud's German Trieb as “instinct” was much more accurately rendered as “drive,” this change was systematically incorporated throughout the text. Second, Solms removed the hyphens from Strachey's frequent use of them in terms such as “psycho-analysis,” “super-ego,” and so forth. To facilitate cross referencing, the corresponding page numbers from the older volumes are conveniently printed in the margins beside the text in the new ones. Therefore, new scholars with access only to the RSE will quite easily be able to deal with older literature with referencing from the SE. Incorporated within the RSE are 58 completely new items, uncovered after the SE publication and scattered throughout the volumes of the new edition. Further and more importantly, Strachey's original text is liberally expanded and annotated with new introductory commentaries, explanatory footnotes and updated information provided by the Editor. All of this new textual material is clearly but unobtrusively identified by light underlining. In a particularly valuable innovation, whenever a problematically translated word appears in the text its German original is indicated in two different ways. If it is one of the words discussed in the “Notes on the Translation,” the German original is immediately inserted afterwards in brackets, and where appropriate its root term from the alphabetical list is printed in the margin. In other more incidental cases where a particular word has been questioned by just one or another critic, the word is annotated with a superscript “T” or “t,” indicating that a discussion of it may be found in a particular section of Volume 24. I am told that the electronic version of the RSE will have the useful feature of hyperlinks to each of these translation annotations, linking to their appropriate listings in Volume 24. With the pdf sample volumes provided to me I was unable to test this potentially valuable feature. We obtain these associations [Assoziationen]. What they bring us is of the most various kinds…. Most of them show a clear connection to some element of the dream…. But it also sometimes happens that the patient introduces them with these words: “This seems to me to have nothing at all to do with the dream, but I tell it you because it occurs [einfällt] to me.” If one listens to these copious associations [Einfällen], one soon notices that they have more in common with the content of the dream than their starting points alone. They throw a surprising light on all the different parts of the dream (Vol. 22, p 11). With these new and valuable features, I would suggest that the overall RSE is appropriately described as an “expanded and annotated” and not just a “revised” edition of Strachey. I will try to illustrate this with examples from the sample volumes provided to me by the publisher. Volume 1: Pre-Psychoanalytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts,-1886–1899. Following the above-discussed Preface to the Revised Edition, the remaining pages of this volume replicate the contents of its predecessor. These start with a number of papers young Freud published between 1886 and 1893 dealing with hysteria, hypnosis and suggestion. These are followed by “Extracts from the Fliess Papers,” and conclude with Freud's 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, the handwritten and posthumously published draft manuscript that Freud privately called his “Psychology for Neurologists.” Newly inserted into the first section are two relatively short book reviews and a more substantial and newly translated “Report on a Lecture ‘On Hypnosis and Suggestion’” in which young Freud quite cogently compared and contrasted the Salpetrière and Nancy approaches to hypnotic phenomena. The original Strachey translations are intact, expanded with occasional updating footnotes and annotations as described above. The following “Extracts from the Fliess Papers” are similarly replicated with occasional new footnotes, including one noting that Freud used the term “metapsychology” as early as 1898, defining it as a biology-based psychology (p. 300). There are also several new references to neuroscientific articles scheduled to be published in the NSW. The most extensive and significant of Solms's annotations appear in the final portion of the volume devoted to Freud's 1895 Project. This is unsurprising because Solms has previously cited this work as foundational in his promotion of Neuropsychoanalysis. Here he makes no explicit reference to that project, however, and in fact downplays “the alluring possibility” of finding plausible anticipations of modern neuropsychology in the work. “For this revised edition,” he declares, “the Editor has accordingly drawn attention to such resemblances only insofar as they place the ‘Project’ in historical context, and thereby enable modern readers to better understand Freud's obscure neuroscientific terminology and concepts” (p. 317). In the course of doing that, Solms's new comments and annotations also constitute an ongoing discussion and critique of Freud's declining success in achieving the work's main stated purpose of “represent[ing] psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles… [with] neurons to be taken as the material particles” (p. 319). Accordingly, Solms quite liberally annotates the early sections of the Project which postulate different neuron types, “translating” Freud's anatomical terms into modern equivalents. When Strachey early on introduces “cathexis” as his translation of Besetzung, Solms explains in a footnote: “In modern neurophysiological terms, the ‘cathexis’ of a neuron in the sense used here is described as its ‘potential’. When the potential of a neuron reaches a certain magnitude, discharge, an action current (the nerve impulse) occurs, and then the potential is gradually reconstituted” (p. 322, fn. 2). Shortly after that Solms comments that Freud's postulation of “contact barriers” separating individual interconnected neurons was a clear anticipation of the “synapse” concept, not yet proposed by Sherrington until 1897 (p. 322, fn3). As the ‘Project’ unfolds: the psychical processes that Freud conceptualized here were processes that required systems-level or functional descriptions. There is accordingly a significant hiatus between the principal theorems as applied at the outset to individual neurons and the nature of the psychical processes themselves described later. These entail vast assemblages of neurons, the behaviour of which necessarily entails the emergence of quite different governing theorems (p. 420). In sum, the available nineteenth-century neurological concepts and “theorems” with which Freud started out and hoped to use as a basis for understanding his clinical psychological findings, were simply inadequate to the task. But also, Solms concludes: “however great or small the revolution was by which ‘nervous energy’ was converted to ‘psychical energy’ in Freud's writings, there can be no question that many major [processes] as described in this work survived in a transmogrified shape to the very end” (p. 420). Volume VII: A Case of Hysteria, Three Essays on Sexuality, and Other Works (1901–1905) This was one of the first SE Volumes to be in and its major contents were the famous Case of Freud's foundational Three Essays on the nature of sexuality, and works on from the early the from which Freud to the of in was in but from publication until In new introductory comments Solms that about was one for the He also notes and references several published after 1953 in which was in fact and the however, Solms the original of any such The is completely the original with just occasional new annotations updating or relatively The same for the Three with occasional new annotations including one Freud's early of of the of Freud (Vol. 7, p. A more extensive new provides a modern on Freud's on the basis of (p. and a new of from a book by the is inserted between pages The of Volume 7 contains several newly and small items to from this early Most of these is a of Freud's in to an extended His an that of the two is to their different in the but in the is only and that be called upon to deal with those that their essential in and that they a in all such Volume 7 with newly uncovered to the the including short book reviews and an for his former Volume New Introductory Lectures on and Other Works New As with the major works in Volume 7, the New Introductory Lectures are reproduced from the SE, annotated with translation for terms. The most important new material in this volume is a to A Psychological This uncovered regarding Freud's with the on a widely criticized psychoanalytic of the former not published until and Following an with Freud in a in the course of which they expressed a for because of experience and Freud because he that some of decisions surrounding I for In the early Freud agreed to in the of a to which he would an and in which the main would be as some of a The RSE between the two the and of the original by Freud, and of the proposed as of but annotated by Freud with numerous and reproduced is an extended handwritten on the that certain of have or of the in The was finally with Freud as first in long after his It was widely criticized as a and many Freud have his to be to The newly published here that none of Freud's and comments were in the published book and his extended was to a single short and Solms also notes that as the to in an important in Freud's from to that may have to Freud's to with The RSE edition also several to the at the including a to the of a and a very short to Albert in in are so much than I that you will be a of by the time you (p. Volume and more than this is the and most volume in the not only the extended on the previously but also a and expanded of and new and relocated Freud items, and of all commentaries and annotations, Most is the Freud which as compared with just in the SE. of the new listings are early and previously items that will be in Solms's Complete Neuroscientific many the publication of and in following the SE. Freud's here to more than quite clearly to have been a The quite accurately this volume as major scholarly work in its and in with the volumes' extensive and annotations it seems that the RSE will on as the “standard” source for serious Freud scholars in to A It would be to have some translations of Freud from the Strachey and Solms one that “faithfully the conventions of the ‘source’ readers may a in that has been taken with the of Freud under the general of This volumes by several different were to more of Freud than those in the SE. These a of popular success but have been criticized by Freud scholars on that the in psychoanalytic and were to “standard” translation practices. Solms's single explicit reference to and the has to be that made a of using (Vol. 24, p. the RSE Solms to some of the volumes with or regarding specific translated words, but his references all the individual without that they are of a It seems English of Freud, these to be by not only in German, but also in Freud's works and the of and in which they were In the Freud scholars can the of the constructed so from the but with of its It seems that the electronic version with its extensive hyperlinks will be particularly The will it out of for many but it will become widely available in and other