The Translator’s Invisibility

Bettelheim’s book is of course couched in the most judgmental of terms, and it is his negative judgment that must be avoided (or perhaps rethought) if we want to understand the manifold significance of the Standard Edition as a translation. Bettelheim views the work of Strachey and his collaborators as a distortion and a betrayal of Freud’s “essential humanism,” a view that points to a valorization of a concept of the transcendental subject in both Bettelheim and Freud. Bettelheim’s assessment of the psychoanalytic project is stated in his own humanistic versions for the Standard Edition’s “ego,” “id,” and “superego”: “A reasonable dominance of our I over our it and above-I—this was Freud’s goal for all of us” (Bettleheim 1983:110). This notion of ego dominance conceives of the subject as the potentially self-consistent source of its knowledge and actions, not perpetually split by psychological (“id”) and social (“superego”) determinations over which it has no or limited control. The same assumption can often be seen in Freud’s German text: not only in his emphasis on social adjustment, for instance, as with the concept of the “reality principle,” but also in his repeated use of his own experience for {28} analysis; both represent the subject as healing the determinate split in its own consciousness. Yet insofar as Freud’s various psychic models theorized the ever-present, contradictory determinations of consciousness, the effect of his work was to decenter the subject, to remove it from a transcendental realm of freedom and unity and view it as the determinate product of psychic and familial forces beyond its conscious control. These conflicting concepts of the subject underlie different aspects of Freud’s project: the transcendental subject, on the one hand, leads to a definition of psychoanalysis as primarily therapeutic, what Bettelheim calls a “demanding and potentially dangerous voyage of self-discovery […] so that we may no longer be enslaved without knowing it to the dark forces that reside in us” (ibid.:4); the determinate subject, on the other hand, leads to a definition of psychoanalysis as primarily hermeneutic, a theoretical apparatus with sufficient scientific rigor to analyze the shifting but always active forces that constitute and divide human subjectivity. Freud’s texts are thus marked by a fundamental discontinuity, one which is “resolved” in Bettelheim’s humanistic representation of psychoanalysis as compassionate therapy, but which is exacerbated by the scientistic strategy of the English translations and their representation of Freud as the coolly analyzing physician.[11] The inconsistent diction in the Standard Edition, by reflecting the positivistic redefinition of psychoanalysis in Anglo-American institutions, signifies another, alternative reading of Freud that heightens the contradictions in his project.

It can be argued, therefore, that the inconsistent diction in the English translations does not really deserve to be judged erroneous; on the contrary, it discloses interpretive choices determined by a wide range of social institutions and cultural movements, some (like the specific institutionalization of psychoanalysis) calculated by the translators, others (like the dominance of positivism and the discontinuities in Freud’s texts) remaining dimly perceived or entirely unconscious during the translation process. The fact that the inconsistencies have gone unnoticed for so long is perhaps largely the result of two mutually determining factors: the privileged status accorded the Standard Edition among English-language readers and the entrenchment of a positivistic reading of Freud in the Anglo-American psychoanalytic establishment. Hence, a different critical approach with a different set of assumptions becomes necessary to perceive the inconsistent diction of the translations: Bettelheim’s {29} particular humanism, or my own attempt to ground a symptomatic reading of translated texts on a foreignizing method of translation that assumes a determinate concept of subjectivity. This sort of reading can be said to foreignize a domesticating translation by showing where it is discontinuous; a translation’s dependence on dominant values in the target-language culture becomes most visible where it departs from them. Yet this reading also uncovers the domesticating movement involved in any foreignizing translation by showing where its construction of the foreign depends on domestic cultural materials.