Freud's English discontents

This is principally in response to st's post Seekrank über den Atlantik: Freud auf Englisch.

The malaise of Freud's English translations, if it is to be addressed as such, is actually of a much shorter passage within the Old World. James and Alix Strachey, the famous British psychoanalyst couple (although Alix was born in the US, she’d studied in Britain) started translating Freud at his request in Vienna, and are still considered to be the translators of the most complete Freud edition in English. The effective political/intellectual context for Freud’s English translations is the fascinating – productive even though complicated – encounter between the Bloomsbury Group and Freudian psychoanalysis that began in the years preceding the First World War and continued into the twenties. The correspondence between the Stracheys from the mid-twenties provides an interesting insight into the early English absorption of psychoanalysis.

But, James Strachey also happens to be the much revered general editor of the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, and the irony is that his initial editorial selections form the basis for many of the modern German language Freud editions, viz. the Studienausgabe.

As for the general problems of Latinization of Freud’s pithy German(ic) vocabulary, two aspects appear to be germane here. First the rather well-known one: unlike the German philosophical/intellectual terminology, the English has historically little or no developed Anglo-Saxon basis. So, it relies almost entirely on Greco-Latinate variants, and this often results in the collapsing of Germanic and Latinate conceptual distinctions. More importantly, as st points out, their connections with the everyday language cut off, concepts appear to hang in an ethereal, academic nowhere. Peter Loewenberg's review of a relatively recent Freud translation discusses some of these issues.

The second and more specific aspect is I think of greater relevance here. The intellectual limitedness of the British Psychoanalytical Society, embodied in the personage of the official Freud-biographer, Ernest Jones, which shaped the English language Freud reception in its early years, also informs Stracheys' translations.

As for st's specific examples, “discontents” is actually not that bad; I would suggest that it doesn’t simply mean Unzufriedenheiten. Apart from the distinction between the singular "discontent" (also meaning Unruhe, e.g. in usages such as “the winter of discontent”) and the plural “discontents”, it has come to mean something not unlike the Unbehagen. For me, the problem lies elsewhere; the most obvious is the translation of Kultur as civilization. But, even more damaging is the juxtaposition and consequent dichotomization through “and”. The latter also points towards the tendency to view integral totalities in terms of binaries. More specifically, the discontents of or in culture are pushed outside of it and are thus painted to be its marginal Other. This translation, with many others, has been hugely influential in the history of Anglo-American academic prose and has spawned many such “discontents”, viz. Capitalism and its Discontents, Globalization and its Discontents etc.