Bruno Bettelheim - Freud and Man's Soul-Vintage y El Alma de Un Hombre (1983)

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FREUDAND
MAN'S SOUL
Bruno Bettelheim
VINTAGE BOOKS
A DIVISION OF RANDOM HOUSE
NEW YORK
FREUD AND MAN'S SOUL
First Vintage Books Edition. January 1984
Copyright © 1981 by Bruno Beuelheim
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
Conventions. Published in tbe United States by Random House. Inc.•
New York. and simultaneously in Canada by Random House
of Canada Limited. Toronto. Originally published by
Alfred A. Knopf. Inc. in 1981.
Much ofthe material in this book appeared originally in

The New Yorker.
Grateful acknowledgment is bereby made to the following

for permission to use previously published material:
{Jiford U"iwrsity Press: Excerpts fnlm the Oxford E"IJlisb
Dictionllry. Used by permission of Oxford University Press.
Simo" IImi Scbust,r, [nc.: With permission. Fnlm
W,lmer's New World Dicsionllry. Second College Edition.
Copyright © 1981 by Simon and Schuster. Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Beuel~eim. Bruno.
Freud and man's soul.
Originally published: New York: Knopf. 1981.
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Freud. Sigmund. 1856-1939.
1. Psychoanalysis. J. Psychoanalysis-Translating.
4. Soul-Psychological aspects.
I. Tide. BFI7).F8S¥ 1984 ISO.JC/51 83-47809
ISHN 0-394-,1036-3 (pbk.)
Manufactured in the United States of :\merica

Psychoanalysis is in essence
a cure through love.
FREUD, in a letteT to lung

Preface
The English translations of Freud's writings are seriously
defective in important respects and have led to erroneous
conclusions, not only about Freud the man but also about
psychoanalysis. This applies even to the authoritative Stan-
dard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund
Freud. After reading the criticisms of this translation that I
present in this book, the reader may well ask why I have
waited so long to publish them, and why others have not
made similar criticisms long ago. Obviously, I cannot an-
swer the second question with any certainty, but the reasons
for my own reluctance may suggest why others too have
hesitated to criticize the translations.
Conversations with friends have disclosed that many
who, like myself, are native German-speakers, and emi-
grated to the United States in the middle of their lives, are
quite dissatisfied with the way Freud's works have been
rendered in English. The number of inadequacies and
downright errors in the translations is enormous; merely to
correct the more blatant ones would be a tremendous task,
and the decision where to begin and what to concentrate on
would be extremely difficult. But the reluctance to discuss
openly the inadequacy of the available translations has been
ultimately due, I believe, to much deeper psychol9gical
reservations.
PREFACE
Most of the translations were completed in Freud's life-

time, and were accepted or, at the very least, condoned by
him. The chief editor of the Standard Edition was one of his
followers whom Freud personally entrusted with the trans-
lation of some of his works; and the co-editor was his daugh-
ter Anna, the person closest to Freud in the last years of
his life and his chosen successor. Under these circum-
stances, criticizing the translations has come to seem almost
like criticizing the venerated master himself. And there has
been a general shying away from doing so, accompanied by
the persistent hope that others-ideally, Freud's chosen
heirs-would undertake this onerous but very necessary
task.
This has been my own hope for nearly forty years. I
know that others much closer than I to the editors of the
Standard Edition have broached the problem and proposed
various remedies, such as adding a twenty-fifth volume of
corrective glossaries. All such suggestions have proved un-
acceptable to the publisher.
Most of the people who lived in Freud's Vienna, and
became familiar with his thought in that place and time,
either have died or are now in their seventies or eighties,
approaching the end of their lives. If, therefore, the mistrans-
lations with which the Standard Edition unfortunately
abounds are ever to be corrected by someone who shared
Freud's cultural background and is closely acquainted with
the language as Freud himself used it, it must be done now.
This is why I have at last overcome the reluctance that I
have felt for so long.
Time has not allowed me anything approaching a com-
IX
plete discussion of the many mistranslations-something

that would in any case be far beyond my capabilities. And
deciding what to focus on has not been easy, especially since
so many widely held ideas about Freud the man, his life, and
aspects of his thought are based on misunderstandings that
have resulted from defective presentations of his thought in
translation, even faulty renderings of quite simple remarks
he made about himself.
In a brief memoir Freud wrote when he was eighty, he
relates an experience he had more than thirty years earlier,
on the occasion of a trip to Athens, as he stood on the
Acropolis ("A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis").
This memoir reveals much about Freud: about his feelings
during his school years, about his relationship with his fa-
ther, about his background. In the final sentence Freud says
that after he had succeeded in analyzing the deeper meaning
of his experience on the Acropolis, he was frequently visited
by the memory of it-which was not surprising, since he
himself was now old, needful of forbearance (an obvious
reference to his terminal illness), and no longer able to
travel. Freud's exact words are: "Und jetzt werden Sie sicb
nicht mebr veT'Wundern, dass micb die Erinnerung an das Erleb-
nis auf der Akropolis so oft beimsucbt ...•" The word he uses
here to refer to the frequent reappearance of this recollec-
tion, beimsucben-"to visit"-is fraught with special mean-
ing, because in Catholic Vienna the Maria Heimsucbung was
(and still is) an important religious holiday, celebrating the
visit of the Virgin Mary to Elizabeth, an event depicted in
many famous paintings and sculptures with which Freud
had become well acquainted in the travels he could now no
PREFACE
longer undertake. And just as Mary learned on this visit

something of profound importance about herself, so too did
Freud's memory, after he successfully analyzed it, reveal to
him things of greatest personal significance. His choice of
the word beimsucbt suggests this.
At the beginning of the essay, where Freud first states
that this memory reasserted itself frequently, and mentions
that initially he did not understand why, he uses the expres-
sion "taucbte immer wieder auf. " Auftaucben means, literally,
"to surface" (out of deep water), but it is also used more
broadly to refer to anything that appears suddenly or
abruptly. That within this essay Freud employs these two
quite different words to name a single phenomenon is an
example of his masterly use of language. Before he analyzes
the recurring memory, he refers to it with a word that
connotes a sudden appearance out of unknown depths, sug-
gesting emergence from the unconscious. After he analyzes
it, and after the reader knows how deeply meaningful this
memory is and why, Freud uses a word that alludes to a
profoundly revealing event, the Visitation.
In the Standard Edition, the final sentence of this essay
is translated: "And now you will no longer wonder that the
recollection of this incident on the Acropolis should have
troubled me so often...." This mistranslation has been
the occasion of some' quite elaborate speculations about
Freud's attitude toward his background, based on the as-
sumption that he said this memory often "troubled" him.
But he said nothing of the sort, remarking merely that it
visited him often, and employing a word that, because of
its ancient religious associations, suggests something of
deepest import..
xi
This is but one relatively minor example of how defec-

tive translation can lead, and has led, to erroneous conclu-
sions about Freud-and I offer it to show why I have been
tempted to discuss here all the many inadequate translations
that have caused a variety of misconceptions about Freud
and about the nature of psychoanalys:s. But, as I have said
above, a truly comprehensive study would be a task of such
magnitude that I have not dared to attempt it. I have instead
decided to concentrate on two smaller tasks: to correct the
mistranslations of some of the most important psy-
choanalytic concepts; and to show how deeply humane a
person Freud was, that he was a humanist in the best sense
of the word. His greatest concern was with man's innermost
being, to which he most frequently referred through the use
of a metaphor-man's soul-because the word "soul"
evokes so many emotional connotations. It is the greatest
shortcoming of the current English versions of his works
that they give no hint of this.
I have discussed the problem of the English translations of

Freud's writings with students and friends over many years,
and I have received so many helpful suggestions that it
would be impossible to mention them all here. But I wish
at least to acknowledge gratefully those given me by Dr.
Paul Kramer, Dr. Richard Sterba, Trude Weisskopf, and
Dr. Henry von Witzleben.
As so often in the past, many thanks are due to Joyce
Jack for her sensitive and careful editing of the original
manuscript of this book. Robert Gottlieb was so kind as to
give it its final form, for which I am most grateful. Last but
not least, I wish to thank Theron Raines for his valuable
PREFACE
suggestions, and most of all for his encouragement, without

which the book might never have been finished.
Most of the passages from Freud quoted here are taken
from the Standard Edition. All unattributed translations are
my own.
B.B.
I
As a child born into a middle-class, assimilated Jewish family
in Vienna, I was raised and educated in an environment that
was in many respects identical with the one that had formed
Freud's background. The culture that was transmitted to me
in my home, then in secondary school, and, finally, at the
University of Vienna, had changed very little since Freud's
student days, fifty years earlier. So it was natural that from
the time I began to think on my own I read Freud. After
studying his earlier works, I eagerly read+bis new ones as
they appeared, from Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) and
The Ego and the Id (1923) through all the later essays, in
which his ideas reached their fullest development. Under-
standing Freud's writings was considerably facilitated by
my thus being able to follow his ideas as he completed the
edifice of psychoanalysis, which he had begun a few years
before I was born. It was also facilitated by my being in
analysis myself and by my study of psychoanalysis in the
same unique Viennese cultural climate in which Freud
worked and thought. When, in middle age, I was fortunate
enough to be permitted to start a new life in the United
States, and began to read and discuss psychoanalytic writ-
ings in English, I discovered that reading Freud in English
translation leads to quite different impressions from those I
had formed when I read him in German. It became apparent
to me that the English renditions of Freud's writings dis-

tort much of the essential humanism that permeates the
originals.
In The Interpretation oj Dreams (1900), which opened to
our understanding not just the meaning of dreams but also
the nature and power of the unconscious, Freud told about
his arduous struggle to achieve ever greater self-awareness.
In other books, he told why he felt it necessary for the rest
of us to do the same. In a way, all his writings are gentle,
persuasive, often brilliantly worded intimations that we, his
readers, would benefit from a similar spiritual journey of
self-discovery. Freud showed us how the soul could become
aware of itself. To become acquainted with the lowest depth
of the soul-to explore whatever personal hell we may suffer
from-is not an easy undertaking. Freud's findings and,
even more, the ;'way he presents them to us give us the
confidence that this demanding and potentially dangerous
voyage of self-discovery will result in our becoming more
fully human, so that we may no longer be enslaved without
knowing it to the dark forces that reside in us. By exploring
and understanding the origins and the potency of these
forces, we not only become much better able to cope with
them but also gain a much deeper and more compassionate
understanding of our fellow man. In his work and in his
writings, Freud often spoke of the soul-of its nature and
structure, its development, its attributes, how it reveals itself
in all we do and dream. Unfortunately, nobody who reads
him in English could guess this, because nearly all his many
references to the soul, and to matters pertaining to the soul,
have been excised in translation.
This fact, combined with the erroneous or inadequate
s
translation of many of the most important original concepts
of psychoanalysis, makes Freud's direct and always deeply
personal appeals to our common humanity appear to readers
of English as abstract, depersonalized, highly theoretical,
erudite, and mechanized-in short, "scientific"-statements
about the strange and very complex workings of our mind.
Instead of instilling a deep feeling for what is most human
in all of us, the translations attempt to lure the reader into
developing a "scientific" attitude toward man and his ac-
tions, a "scientific" understanding of the unconscious and
how it conditions much of our behavior.
I became aware of this in the 1940s. when I became
director of the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School.
for disturbed children. The staff members I worked with
were well read in Freud; they were convinced that they had
made his ideas their own. and they tried to put their under-
standing of Freud into practice in their work with the
children. The considerable theoretical understanding of un-
conscious processes which they had acquired from study-
ing Freud remained exactly that: theoretical. It was of little
use in helping children afflicted by severe psychiatric dis-
orders; often it was even an impediment. It was a reasoned-
out. emotionally distant understanding. What was needed
was emotional closeness based on an immediate sympa-
thetic comprehension of all aspects of the child's soul~
of what afflicted it, and why. What was needed was
what Freud occasionally spoke of explicitly but much more
often implicitly: a spontaneous sympathy of our uncon-
scious with that of others. a feeling response of our soul to
theirs. By reading Freud in translation, the staff members
had missed all this-one cannot be expected to gain an
understanding of the soul if the soul is never mentioned.

The biggest shortcoming of the translations is that,
through their use of abstractions, they make it easy for the
reader to distance himself from what Freud sought to teach
about the inner life of man and of the reader himself. Psy-
choanalysis becomes in English translation something that
refers and applies to others as a system of intellectual con-
structs. Therefore, students of psychoanalysis are not led to
take it personally-they are not moved to gain access to their
own unconscious and everything else within them that is
most human but is nevertheless unacceptable to them.
For nearly forty years, I have taught courses in psycho-
analysis to American graduate students and residents in psy-
chiatry. Again and again, I have been made to see how
seriously the English translations impede students' efforts to
gain a true understanding of Freud and of psychoanalysis.
Although most of the bright and dedicated students whom
it has been my pleasure to teach were eager to learn what
psychoanalysis is all about, they were largely unable to do
so. Almost invariably, I have found that psychoanalytic con-
cepts had become for these students a way of looking only
at others, from a safe distance-nothing that had any bearing
on them. They observed other people through the spectacles
of abstraction, tried to comprehend them by means of intel-
lectual concepts, never turning their gaze inward to the soul
or their own unconscious. This was true even of the stu-
dents who were in analysis themselves-it made no appre-
ciable difference. Psychoanalysis had helped some of them
to be more at peace with themselves and to cope with life,
had helped others to free themselves of troublesome neu-
rotic symptoms, but their misconceptions about psychoanal-
7
ysis remained. Psychoanalysis as these students perceived it

was a purely intellectual system-a clever, exciting game-
rather than the acquisition of insights into oneself and one's
own behavior which were potentially deeply upsetting. It
was always someone else 1 unconscious they analyzed, hardly
ever their own. They did not give enough thought to the
fact that Freud, in order to create psychoanalysis and under-
stand the workings of the unconscious, had had to analyze
his O'W7Z dreams, understand his own slips of the tongue and
the reasons be forgot things or made various other mistakes.
The best explanation for these students' failure to grasp
the essence of Freud's thinking is the universal wish to
remain unaware of one's own unconscious. Freud, who un-
derstood very well that this would be true for his readers,
tried to speak to them as directly as possible. When he wrote
about himself and his patients, he wrote in a manner de-
signed to induce the reader to recognize that he was speak-
ing about us all-about the reader as much as about himself,
his patients, and others. Freud's choice of words and his
direct style serve the purpose of making the reader apply
psychoanalytic insights to himself, because only from his
inner experience can he fully understand what Freud was
writing about.
The errors in the translations of Freud become particu-
larly misleading when they are compounded by the un-
avoidable distortions arising from the span of time that
separates us from the era in which Freud formulated his
ideas. In translation, Freud's ideas had to be transferred not
only into a different language but into a different cultural
environment-one in which most readers have only a nod-
ding acquaintance with classical European literature. So
most of Freud's allusions fall on deaf ears. Many of the

expressions he used have been reduced to mere technical
terms; the key words no longer have a multiplicity of special
connotations, even though Freud chose them because they
carried deep meaning and were vibrant with special human-
istic resonances.
II
Language is all-important in Freud's work; it is the supreme
instrument of his craft. His use of the German language was
not only masterly but often poetic-he nearly always ex-
pressed himself with true eloquence. This is well known and
widely recognized among those familiar with German writ-
ings. It has been remarked frequently that Freud's case histo-
ries read as well as the best novels written in his time. Many
German writers recognized Freud as a great stylist: Thomas
Mann, referring to one of Freud's books, wrote that "in
structure and form it is related to all great German essay
writing, of which it is a masterpiece." Hermann Hesse
praised Freud because his work "convinces both through its
very high human and very high literary qualities," and
added that his language, while "completely intellectual, is
beautifully concise and exact in its definitions." Albert Ein-
stein said that he admired Freud particularly for his achieve-
ment as a writer, and that he did not know any other
contemporary who could present his subject with such mas-
9
tery of the German language. I Indeed, Freud modeled his

style on the German classics-most of all on Goethe, whom
he read closely as a student and who influenced him pro-
foundly. (It was Goethe, incidentally, who introduced the
term "sublimate"-sublimieren-into the German language
in reference to human feelings that must be worked at,
improved, and elevated.)
Because Freud attached so much importance to finding
the mot juste, his translators' clumsy substitutions and inex-
act use of language are all the more damaging to his ideas.
Deprived of the right word or the appropriate phrasing,
Freud's thoughts become not merely coarse or oversim-
plified but seriously distorted. Slipshod translations deprive
his words of some or most of the subtle sensory tones and
allusions that he deliberately evoked to permit the reader to
understand what he had in mind, and to respond not only
on an intellectual level but also on an emotional one-not
merely with the conscious mind but also with the uncon-
scious mind. Only by comprehending his writings on both
levels is it possible to grasp Freud's full meaning, in all its
subtlety and richness, and this is crucial for a correct under-
standing of psychoanalysis.
Whenever Freud thought it possible, he tried to commu-
nicate his new ideas in the most common terms, words that
his readers had used since childhood; his great achievement
as a stylist was to imbue these words with nuances, mean-
ings, and insights that had not been part of their everyday
'These and many more expressions of admiration for Freud's literary master-
ship can be found in Walter Schiinau's analysis of Freud's style: Sigmllnd Frerlds
Prora. Germanistische Allhandlungen 15, Stuttgart, l\Iet'~lerische \' erlagslluch-
handlung, '1)611,
use. When he could not communicate sufficiently by using

readily available familiar terms, he would create ~ew words
from common ones, sometimes by combining two words,
which is a standard practice in the German language. Only
if common words, even when they were invested with new
meanings or used in combination or juxtaposition, seemed
inadequate to express what he intended to convey did he
resort to the use of Greek or Latin-to terms such as the
"Oedipus complex," which are derived from classical myths.
Even then, he chose words he thought would be familiar to
his readers and thus be invested with connotations impor-
tant in communicating both his overt and his deeper mean-
ings. He assumed that his readers would be cultivated people
who had been schooled in the classics, as he had been. (In
Freud's day, Gymnasium, or secondary school, students
were required to study Greek and Latin.)
III
Among the Greek words that Freud used in very significant
ways are "Eros" and "erotic"; from these words is derived
the important concept of erotogenic zones, the term Freud
created to name areas of the body particularly sensitive to
erotic stimulation, such as the oral, anal, and genital zones.
The concept first appeared in Three Essays on the Theory of
Sexuality (1905). In a preface to the fourth edition, written
in 1910, Freud stressed "how closely the enlarged concept of
II
sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides with the Eros of divine

Plato." For readers who, like Freud, were steeped in the
classic tradition, words such as "Eros" and "erotic" called
up Eros's charm and cunning and-perhaps more important
-his deep love for Psyche, the soul, to whom Eros is wed-
ded in everlasting love and devotion. For those familiar with
this myth, it is impossible to think of Eros without being
reminded at the same time of Psyche, and how she had at
first been tricked into believing that Eros was disgusting,
with the most tragic consequences. To view Eros or any-
thing connected with him as grossly sexual or monstrous is
an error that, according to the myth, can lead to catastrophe.
(It would be equally erroneous to confuse Eros with Cupid:
Cupid is an irresponsible, mischievous little boy; Eros is
fully grown, at the height of the beauty and strength of
young manhood.) In order for sexual love to be an experi-
ence of true erotic pleasure, it must be imbued with beauty
(symbolized by Eros) and express the longings of the soul
(symbolized by Psyche). These were some of the connota-
tions that Freud had in mind when he used words like
"Eros" and "erotic." Devoid of such connotations, which
are closely related to their classical origin, these words not
only lose much of the meaning he wished them to evoke but
may even be invested with meanings opposite to those he
intended.
This is true of the word "psychoanalysis" itself, which
Freud coined. Those who use this now-familiar term are
usually vaguely aware that it combines two words of Greek
origin, but few are conscious of the fact that the two words
refer to strongly contrasting phenomena. "Psyche" is the
soul-a term full of the richest meaning, endowed with
emotion, comprehensively human and unscientific. "Analy-

sis" implies a taking apart, a scientific examination. English
readers of Freud are further thrown off by the fact that in
English the accent in "psychoanalysis" is on "analysis," thus
emphasizing the part of the word whose connotations are
.scientific. With the German word Psychoanalyse, on the
other hand, the accent is on the first syllable-on "psyche,"
the soul. By coining the term "psychoanalysis" to describe
his work, Freud wished to emphasize that by isolating and
examining the neglected and hidden aspects of our souls we
can acquaint ourselves with those aspects and understand
the roles they play in our lives. It was Freud's emphasis on
the soul that made his analysis different from all others.
What we think and feel about man's soul-our own soul-
is all-important in Freud's view. Unfortunatf7ly, when we
now use the word "psyche" in the compound word "psy-
choanalysis" or in other compound words, such as "psychol-
ogy," we no longer react to the words with the feelings that
Freud intended to evoke. This was not true for his contem-
poraries in Vienna; for them, "psyche" used in any combi-
nation never lost its real meaning.
The story of Psyche may have been particularly attrac-
tive to Freud because she had to enter the underworld and
retrieve something there before she could attain her apo-
theosis. Freud, similarly, had to dare to enter the under-
world-in his case, the underworld of the soul-to gain
his illumination. He alluded to the story of Amor (or Eros)
and Psyche in his essay "The Theme of the Three Cas-
kets" (1913), in which he analyzed the unconscious motives
that may explain the frequently evoked image of the al-
ways fateful choice among three: three caskets in The Mer-
cbant of Venice, three daughters in King Lear, three god-
desses in the judgment of Paris, and three sisters of whom
Psyche was the most beautiful. Freud tried to show that
two related topics underlie this motif: the wish to believe
that we have a choice where we have none, and a symbolic
expression of the three fateful roles that the female plays in
the life of the male-as mother, as beloved, and, finally, as
the symbolic mother (Mother Earth) to whom man returns
when he dies. The tale of Amor and Psyche describes the
deep attachment of a mother to her son-the relationship
that Freud considered the most unainbivalent in a man's
life. It also depicts the extreme jealousy that a mother feels
for the girl her son loves. As Apuleius tells it, Psyche's
beauty was so great that she was more venerated than
Venus, and that outraged Venus. "With parted lips,"
Venus "kissed her son long and fervently" to persuade
him to destroy Psyche. But, despite his mother's efforts to
seduce him into doing her bidding, Amor falls deeply in
love with Psyche. This only increases Venus's jealousy,
and she sets out to destroy Psyche by demanding tasks of
her that she thinks will kill her, including that of bringing
a casket filled with "a day's worth of beauty" up from the
underworld. And, to make sure of Amor, Venus locks him
up. In desperation, Amor turns for help to his father, Jupi-
ter, who, remembering his own amorous experiences, ac-
cepts Psyche as his son's bride.
In some respects, the story of Amor and Psyche is a
counterpart of that of Oedipus, but there are important
differences. The Oedipus legend tells of a father's fear that
his son will replace him; to avert this, the father tries to
destroy his son. Psyche'S story tells of a mother who is afraid
that a young girl will replace her in the affections of man-

kind and of her son, and who therefore tries to destroy the
girl. But, while the tale of Oedipus ends tragically, the tale
of Amor and Psyche has a happy ending, and this fact is
significant. A mother's love for her son and her jealous rage
against the girl he prefers to her can be openly acknowl-
edged. That the young girl surpasses the mature woman in
beauty, that a son turns away from his mother to embrace
his bride, that a bride has to suffer from the jealousy of her
lover's mother-all this, although extremely troublesome,
accords with normal human emotions, and is in line with the
natural conflict of the generations. That is why in the end
Jupiter and Venus accept the situation; Amor and Psyche
celebrate their wedding in the presence of all the gods;
Psyche is made immortal; and Venus makes peace with her.
But Oedipus, in killing his father and marrying his mother,
acts out in reality a common childhood fantasy that ought
to have remained just that. In doing so, Oedipus acts against
nature, which requires that a son marry a woman of his own
generation, and not his mother, and that he make his peace
with his father. Thus, his story results in tragedy for all
involved in the events.
Whether Freud was impressed by the parallels and dif-
ferences of these two ancient myths we do not know, but
we do know how fascinated he was by Greek mythology:
he studied it assiduously, and he collected Greek, Roman,
and Egyptian statuary. He knew that Psyche was depicted
as young and beautiful, and as having the wings of a bird or
a butterfly. Birds and butterflies are symbols of the soul in
many cultures, and serve to emphasize its transcendental
nature. These symbols invested the word "psyche" with
connotations of beauty, fragility, and insubstantiality-ideas
we still connect with the soul-and they suggest the great
respect, care, and consideration with which Psyche had to
be approached, because any other approach would violate,
even destroy her. Respect, care, and consideration are atti-
tudes that psychoanalysis, too, requires.
IV
The purpose of Freud's lifelong struggle was to help us
understand ourselves, so that we would no longer be pro-
pelled, by forces unknown to us, to live lives of discontent,
or perhaps outright misery, and to make others miserable,
very much to our own detriment. In examining the content
of the unconscious, Freud called into question some deeply
cherished beliefs, such as the unlimited perfectibility of Irian
and his inherent goodness; he made us aware of our ambiva-
lences and of our ingrained narcissism, with its origins in
infantile self-centeredness, and he showed us its destructive
nature. In his life and work, Freud truly heeded the admoni-
tion inscribed on the temple of Apollo at Delphi-"Know
thyself"-and he wanted to help us do the same. But to
know oneself profoundly can be extremely upsetting. It
implies the obligation to change oneself-an arduous and
painful task. Many of the current misconceptions about
Freud and psychoanalysis have arisen from the fear of self-
knowledge-from the comforting view, abetted by the emo-
tionally distancing language of the translations, that psy-

choanalysis is a method of analyzing selected aspects of
the behavior of other people. Freud's insights threaten our
narcissistic image of ourselves. How ironic that the work
of a man who strove ardently for self-understanding should
have led to so many defensive misconceptions about psycho-
analysis!
By selectively accepting only some of Freud's· ideas
about the role of the sexual drives in man's makeup, and by
misunderstanding his tragic belief that man's destructive
tendencies spring from a dark side of the soul, and pervert-
ing this belief into a facile theory that the negative aspects
of man's behavior are merely the consequence of his living
in a bad society, many of Freud's followers have trans-
formed psychoanalysis from a profound view of man's con-
dition into something shallow. Freud was convinced that
the creation of civilized society, despite all its shortcomings,
was still man's nobl~st achievement. Only by seriously mis-
interpreting what Freud wrote in Totem and Taboo (1912-13)
and Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) can one arrive at
the comfortable assumption that psychoanalysis, instead of
confronting us with the abyss within ourselves and forcing
on us the incredibly difficult task of taming and controlling
its chaos, would make life easy and pleasurable, and permit
us, on the pretext of self-expression, to indulge our sexual
desires without any restraints, risks, or price. All of Freud's
work to uncover the unconscious was intended to give us
some degree of rational control over it, so that when acting
in line with its pressures was not appropriate, the releasing
of these pressures could be postponed or neutralized, or-
most desirable of all-the powers of the unconscious could
be redirected through sublimation to serve higher and better
purposes.
The difficulties that Freud experienced during his self-
analysis and the difficulties that his patients had in summon-
ing up the memories they had repressed made it obvious to
him that the discovery of one's unconscious could never be
easy. Some early experiences taught him that careful control
over the patient's positive transference to the analyst and
over the analyst's own feelings was absolutely necessary, in
order to avoid undesirable consequences. He concluded that
a special setting was required if the psychoanalytic work of
self-discovery was to proceed safely and effectively. For the
patient to safely open the caldron of the unconscious, setting
free his emotions and undoing repressions-many of which
had been quite useful in carrying on with the task of living
in society-it was necessary to restrict the process to rela-
tively short and well-circumscribed periods. Only then
could one venture to unleash thoughts and feelings that,
for one's own good and that of others, ordinarily had to be
kept under control. Only then could one take a good look at
what went on in one's unconscious without incurring the
danger that this process would interfere with one's normal
life outside the treatment room, and disrupt one's personal
relations.
Freud's cautious approach has been disregarded in many
quarters, and it has come to be popularly assumed that psy-
choanalysis advocates an unrestrained letting-go, not
through talking in seclusion for a strictly limited period of
time but through behaving without restraint all the time in
all situations, regardless of the havoc this might play in one's
own life and the lives of others. Because psychoanalysis has
revealed the crippling consequences of too much repression,

it has come to be assumed that it advocates the absence of
all controls. Because psychoanalysis requires that "it should
all come out"-though only for some fifty minutes a day,
and under the guidance of a specially trained and trust-
worthy therapist, who will protect one from going too far
or too fast in uncovering the unconscious-it has come to
be assumed that psychoanalysis advocates "letting it all hang
out," all over the place, all the time. "Know thyself" has
become "Do whatever you please."
Freud repeatedly stressed that the enemies-the detrac-
tors-of psychoanalysis posed no danger to its development;
his concern was with the naive friends of his new science
and with those who would use it to justify whatever their
selfish desires led them to do and to inflict on others. He
feared that psychoanalysis would be destroyed if it was
widely accepted without being understood. After visiting
the United States-where, in 190<), at Clark University, he
received his first and only honorary degree for his achieve-
ments-Freud predicted that psychoanalysis was likely to
suffer such a fate in this country. In 1930, he wrote,
I often hear that psychoanalysis is very popular in

the United States and that it doesn't meet there with
the same obstinate resistance as it does in Europe.
. . . It seems to me that the popularity of the name
of psychoanalysis in America signifies neither a
friendly attitude to its essence nor any extension and
deepening of its understanding.... Most frequently
one finds among American doctors and writers only
a very inadequate familiarity with psychoanalysis, so
19
that they know only some names and slogans, which

does not prevent them from certainty in making
judgments.·
Like the father of American psychology, William James,

Freud based his work mainly on introspection-his own
and that of his patients. Introspection is what psychoanalysis
is all about. Although Freud is often quoted today in intro-
ductory psychology texts-more often, in fact, than any
other writer on psychologyl-his writings have only su-
perficially influenced the work of the academic psycholo-
gists who quote him. Psychological research and teaching in
'American universities are either behaviorally, cognitively,
or physiologically oriented and concentrate almost exclu-
sively on what can be measured or observed from the out-
side; introspection plays no part. American psychology has
become all analysis-to the complete neglect of the psyche,
or soul.
In the field of developmental psychology-which would
hardly exist without Freud-most references to Freud's
work are either refutations or trivializations of his ideas. Dr.
Benjamin Spock, the most famous pediatrician of his day,
applies many of Freud's insights into the minds of children
in his book Baby and Child Care. In one of the two passages
where he mentions Freud, Spock writes, "[The child's] pre-
vious intense attachments to his two parents will have served
'Introduction to an article in the Medical Rroit'ID oj Rroit'IDs, 36, '930.

lin a recent tally. Freud topped the list with 3.8 citations. Next came Skinner
with '40. and Piaget with .07. See N. S. Endler. J. P. Rushton. and H. L. Roediger.
"Productivity and Scholarly Impact (citations) of British. Canadian. and U.S.
Departments of Psychology '975." American Psychologist, '978. 33.
their main constructive purpose and will be progressively

outgrown. (Freud called this shift the resolution of the Oedi-
pus complex.)" It is as simple as that! Attachments serve
purposes and are outgrown, without any conflict or resi-
dues. The Oedipus complex, Spock seems to think, disap-
pears automatically with the passage of time-even though
Freud showed how deeply the Oedipus complex shapes us
all through life.
v
Freud coined the term "Oedipus complex" to describe the
welter of ideas, emotions, and impulses, all largely or en-
tirely unconscious, that center around the relations a child
forms to his parents. It is impossible to understand why
Freud chose this particular term-this metaphor-if one is
not familiar with the important details of Oedipus'S story.
Unfortunately, most of the American graduate students
whom I have tried to acquaint with psychoanalysis have had
only the scantest familiarity with either the myth of Oedipus
or Sophocles's play Oedipus Rex.
The story of Oedipus begins with the incredibly severe
psychological and physical traumatization of a child by
those who should be his prime protectors: his parents. The
infant Oedipus-born of Laius and Jocasta, the King and
Qgeen of Thebes, who have been warned by an oracle that
their son is fated to murder his own father-is maimed (a
11
spike thrust through his feet) and sent away to be killed.

Spared from this early death, Oedipus is raised by the King
and Q!:!een of Corinth, and he grows up believing them to
be his true parents. When, one day, someone suggests to him
that they are not, Oedipus becomes so concerned that he
consults the oracle at Delphi. The oracle tells Oedipus-just
as his true parents have been told-that he will slay his father
and marry his mother.
Shocked by this prophecy, Oedipus so strongly desires
to protect those who he thinks are his parents that he flees
Corinth, determined never to return. He begins wandering
through Greece, where, at a crossroads, he meets, quarrels
with, and murders a stranger: his father, Laius. Eventually,
Oedipus arrives at Thebes, at a time when the city is ravaged
by the Sphinx, who has settled on a nearby cliff, posing
riddles to all who attempt to pass by and destroying anyone
who cannot give the correct answer. Oedipus, homeless and
caring little for his life, accepts the Sphinx's challenge.
When he succeeds in solving the riddle she poses to him, he
is rewarded by being made King of Thebes and he marries
Jocasta. Many years later, a plague descends on the city as
punishment for the unavenged murder of Laius. Oedipus is
forced to try to find the murderer, and, when the truth is
revealed, he blinds himself and Jocasta commits suicide.
The meaning of the term "Oedipus complex" is sym-
bolic. Like all the metaphors Freud used in his writings, this
term is valuable primarily for its suggestiveness and referen-
tial richness. It is a metaphor operating on many levels, since
it alludes to other metaphors by its overt and covert refer-
ences to the myth and the drama. Freud chose it to illumine
and vivify a concept that defies more concise expression. If
we believe, as many of my students did, that the term "Oedi-

pus complex" implies only that little boys want to kill the
man they know is their father and marry the woman they
know is their mother, then our understanding is based on an
extreme simplification of the myth. After all, Oedipus did
not know what he was doing when he killed Laius and
married Jocasta, and his greatest desire was to make it impos-
sible for himself to harm those he thought were his parents.
What this term should suggest to us are the child's anxiety
and guilt for having patricidal and incestuous wishes, as well
as the consequences of acting on these wishes.
.Oedipus's guilt and his discovery of the truth are the
central issues in Sophocles's play, and they are reflected in
the main features of the Oedipus complex. Freud found that
when we are no longer children we are unaware of the
negative feelings about the parent of the same sex and the
sexual feelings about both our parents that we had at an early
age, because we have deeply repressed many aspects of these
feelings. Second, although these complex and ambivalent
feelings about our parents are unknown to us as adults, we
continue to be unconsciously motivated by them and we
unconsciously feel guilty for them. These unconscious
desires and unconscious guilt feelings can have devastating
consequences. Finally, when the repressed hostility against
the parent of the same sex and the sexual longings for the
parent of the opposite sex at last become accessible to our
conscious recognition, then we can take actions to stop the
terrible consequences of these feelings.
In thinking about the Oedipus complex, we must keep
in mind what both the myth and Sophocles's play tell us:
that Oedipus acted as he did because his parents completely
13
rejected him as an infant, and that a child who was not

utterly rejected by both his parents would never act as Oedi-
pus did. Freud's ideas about the deep repression of Oedipal
wishes and the severity of Oedipal guilt-so very important
for understanding the conflict that shapes much of our per-
sonality-make no sense if our father has actually tried to
kill us when we were infants; why would we feel guilty for
wishing to get rid of such a villain? And the wish to 1(J~e and
to be loved exclusively and forever by our mother, as well
as the guilt for wishing to possess her, makes no sense if our
mother has actually turned against us when we were young.
It is only our love for our parents and our conscious wish
to protect them that leads us to repress our negative and
sexual feelings directed toward them. These hidden feelings
are what Freud referred to when he spoke of Oedipal guilt.
Oedipus, in fleeing Corinth, paid no attention to the
admonitory temple inscription "Know thyself." The in-
scription implicitly warned that anyone who did not know
himself would misunderstand the sayings of the oracle. Be-
cause Oedipus was unaware of his innermost feelings, he
fulfilled the prophecy. Because he was unknowing of him-
self, he believed that he could murder the father who had
raised him well, and marry the mother who loved him as a
son. Oedipus acted out his metaphorical blindness-his
blindness to what the oracle had meant, based on his lack of
knowledge of himself-by depriving himself of his eyesight.
In doing so, he may have been inspired by the example of
Teiresias, the blind seer who reveals to Oedipus the truth
about Laius's murder. We encounter in Teiresias the idea
that having one's sight turned away from the external world
and directed inward-toward the inner nature of things-
gives true knowledge and permits understanding of what is

hidden and needs to be known.
The guiding principle of psychoanalysis is that knowing
oneself requires knowing also one's unconscious and dealing
with it, so that its unrecognized pressures will not lead one
to act in a way detrimental to oneself and others. With this
in mind, the self-knowledge required for a true understand-
ing of the sayings of the oracle might be seen as extending
to the normally unconscious aspects of ourselves. Freud's
concept of the Oedipus complex thus contains the implied
warning that we need to become aware of our unconscious.
If we do, we will then be able to control it. When we then
find ourselves at a crossroads, not knowing which way to
turn and feeling blocked by some father figure, we will not
strike out at him in uncontrolled anger and frustration. We
will not, in moments of great stress, be pushed by our un-
conscious to act in ways that will destroy us, as Oedipus's
actions destroyed him.
It is very much part of the Oedipus myth-and hence,
by implication, of the Oedipus complex-that as long as the
Oedipal deed and the unconscious Oedipal wishes, aggres-
sions, and anxieties that led to the deed remain unknown,
they continue to exert their destructive power; the pesti-
lence that ravaged Thebes symbolizes this. When Oedipus
learns the true cause of the pestilence, he cleanses himself,
and the pestilence stops. This is a crucial part of the myth:
as soon as the unknown is made known-as soon as the
secret of the father's murder and the incest with the mother
are brought to light, and the hero purges himself-the perni-
cious consequences of the Oedipal deeds disappear. The
myth also warns that the longer one defends oneself against
knowing these secrets, the greater is the damage to oneself
and to others. The psychoanalytic construct of the Oedipus
complex contains this implicit warning, too. Freud discov-
ered, both in his self-analysis and in his work with his pa-
tients, that when one has the courage to face one's own
unconscious patricidal and incestuous desires--which is tan-
tamount to purging oneself of them-the evil consequences
of these feelings subside. He found that becoming aware of
our unconscious feelings-which makes them no longer
unconscious but part of our conscious mind-is the best
protection against an Oedipal catastrophe.
It is just possible that in developing his theory of the
Oedipus complex Freud subconsciously responded to his
familiarity with the myth of Oedipus and with Sophocles's
tragedy because both warn of the utterly destructive conse-
quences of acting without knowing what one is doing.
Freud's discoveries permit us to understand also the deeper
meaning of the story of the Sphinx, which probably had its
origin in the unconscious insights of the myth's inventors.
The Oedipus legend juxtaposes the radicaIIy opposite out-
comes of our actions when we are driven by unconscious
pressures, as Oedipus was when he kiIIed Laius, and when
we are free of such pressures, as Oedipus was in his encoun-
ter with the Sphinx. The Sphinx, not being a father figure,
did not arouse psychological ambivalences and difficulties in
Oedipus, so that, when meeting the Sphinx, he was in fuII
possession of all his rational powers and thus was easily able
tO'solve the Sphinx's riddle. Freud showed how this applies
to all of us: when we are able to confront dark forces with
the powers of our rational mind, unencumbered by un-
conscious pressures, then rationality wins out; and when
rationality dominates our actions, we can overcome the

destructive powers and free ourselves of their ability to
harm us.
The Sphinx, who posed riddles and devoured those who
could not solve them, was herself a riddle, since she was part
woman and part destructive animal. The upper part of her
body was that of a woman with prominent breasts; the lower
part, the part in which her sexual organs are located, was
that of a lion with terrible claws. She is at once a symbol of
the good, nurturing mother and of the bad, destructive
mother. She symbolizes the child's fear that, because he
wishes to devour his mother so that she will be all his, never
able to leave him (an idea that has its origins in the fact that
the child eats off his mother, tries to swallow part of her
body as he nurses), she will retaliate by devouring him.
Because we are told that the Sphinx posed all sorts of
riddles, we must assume that the one she asked Oedipus was
designed specifically for him. The riddle went as follows:
"In the morning it goes on four feet, at noon on two, and
in the evening on three," and "Just when it walks on most
feet, its speed and strength are at their lowest ebb." The
correct answer, which Oedipus supplied, was "man"-for
in the "morning" of his life (infancy) he crawls about on all
fours, at "noon" (the prime of life) he walks on two feet, and
in the "evening" (old age) he requires the assistance of a
"third foot," that is, a cane or walking stick; and, of course,
it is in infancy, when he has the "most feet," that he also has
the least strength and speed of movement. But, as Thomas
De Qyincey has pointed out, the subject of the riddle, and
also its solution, is not just man in general but Oedipus in
particular: nobody is as weak at birth as the abandoned
infant with its feet pinned together, and nobody needs more
assistance in old age than Oedipus did in his years of blind-
ness. Certainly Oedipus, owing to the lasting effects of his
early trauma, must have been more concerned with' the
problems posed by walking than most people are, and more
likely to think of walking and what it means at various ages;
as an infant, crawling on all fours, he must have been more
keenly aware than an ordinary child of his inability to walk
on two feet. What the story of the Sphinx seems to empha-
size is that the answer to the riddle of life is not just man,
but each person himself. Thus, the myth tells us again that
we must know ourselves in order to free ourselves from
destructive powers.
In Freud's system, Oedipal desires and castration anxiety
are closely connected: castration anxiety contributes to the
abandonment of Oedipal strivings and leads to the develop-
ment of the controlling institutions of the mind and moral-
ity. Today we think that the child's love for his parents also
has a great deal to do with these developments. Shakespeare
recognized this when, in Sonnet CLI, he wrote, "Yet who
knows not conscience is born of love?" Freud believed it was
the father's fear of being replaced, of being overcome by his
son, that accounted for the practice of circumcision-a sym-
bolic castration-in primitive societies. Since the time Freud
expressed these ideas doubts have arisen about his views on
the meaning of circumcision, I but it is certain that he recog-
nized the role parental attitudes play in the formation and
the resolution of the Oedipus complex. The importance of
parental attitudes is clearly indicated in the myth.
'See, among other writings, my own book Symbolic WoulIds.

Had Oedipus's parents not believed in the oracle's pre-

diction, they would not have attempted to murder their son.
It was common knowledge at the time that the sayings
of the Pythia were ambiguous and difficult to interpret
correctly. For Laius and Jocasta to accept this prophecy
uncritically, they must have been convinced that their inter-
pretation of the oracle was correct, just as Oedipus was
convinced that his interpretation was correct and that the
oracle was referring to his foster parents. What convinced
Oedipus were the Oedipal feelings he had developed toward
those who had raised him from infancy; what convinced his
parents were their feelings toward their child, feelings that
are as much a part of the Oedipus complex as are those of
the child.
Laius's interpretation of the oracle's saying seemed plau-
sible to him because he feared that his son would replace
him: initially, in the affections of his wife, and, later, in his
role in society. While the first of these fears is often-albeit
not always--unwarranted, the second is not, since in the
normal course of events the son replaces the father in society
as the father grows old and the son achieves manhood.
Jocasta must have feared that she might love her son more
than she loved her husband; otherwise, she would have tried
to persuade Laius that he had misunderstood the meaning
of the prophecy and that no son of theirs would do what had
been predicted. If she had not had such fears, she would
never have agreed to have Oedipus sent away to die but
would have made some effort to rescue him. It was because
she did not-because she participated in the plot to kill her
son-that Jocasta later killed herself. Her suicide had noth-
ing to do with guilt for her incest with Oedipus, as many
19
of my students believed it did; Sophocles makes this clear.

The Oedipus legend thus foreshadows the psy-
choanalytic finding that the Oedipal wishes and anxieties of
the child have their counterparts in the feelings of the par-
ents toward the child. These feelings are the parents' attrac-
tion to the child of the opposite sex and their ambivalence
about (or even resentment 00 the child of the same sex, who
they fear will replace them. If parents permit themselves to
be dominated by these feelings, then the kind of tragedy
results that both the myth and Sophocles's play tell about.
There is stilI much to be learned about Freud's life,
work, and thoughts, since many important records are still
locked up in the Freud Archives in the Library of Congress
and will not become available until the year 1000. I doubt,
though, that even when these archives are opened we will
attain certainty about all the conscious and subconscious
thoughts that went into Freud's formation of the concept of
the Oedipus complex; it was too difficult to develop and
took too long to arrive at. This is suggested by the fact that
more than ten years elapsed between Freud's first mention
of Sophocles's Oedipus in connection with what he was
discovering about children's unconscious feelings toward
their parents (this was in a letter to his friend Wilhelm
Fliess, written at the time of Freud's self-analysis) and his
actual naming of the Oedipus complex in a publication.
As early as 1900 Freud wrote of the similarities between
psychoanalysis and Oedipus Rex: "The action of the play
consists in nothing other than the process of revealing, step
by step, with mounting excitement and cunning delays--
comparable to the work of psychoanalysis-that Oedipus
himself is not only the murderer of Laius but also the son
of the murdered man and of Jocasta." In contemplating

Sophocles's Oedipus as Freud did, one realizes that the entire
play is essentially Oedipus's struggle to get at the hidden
truth. It is a battle for knowledge in which Oedipus has to
overcome tremendous inner resistance against recognizing
the truth about himself, because he fears so much what he
might discover. Anyone who is familiar with the tragedy, as
Freud expected his readers to be, cannot help being im-
pressed that Sophocles does not present the Oedipal deed;
even the Oedipal wishes are mentioned only briefly, in
Jocasta's remark: "Nor need this mother-marrying frighten
you; many a man has dreamt as much." In a way, Sopho-
cles's play seems to imply that (the wish) to do away with
the father and (the wish) to marry the mother is fate, just as
the myth says it is, and that is that. What forms the essence
of our humanity-and of the play-is not our being victims
of fate, but our struggle to discover the truth about our-
selves. Jocasta, who clearly states that she does not wish to
discover the truth, cannot face it when it is revealed, and she
perishes. Oedipus, who does face the truth, despite the im-
mense dangers to himself of which he is at least dimly aware,
survives. Oedipus suffers much, but at the end, at Colonus,
he not only finds peace, but is called to the god and becomes
transfigured.
What is most significant about Oedipus, the Oedipal
situation, and the Oedipus complex is not only the tragic
fate that we all are projected into deep conflicts by our
infantile desires, but also the need to resolve these conflicts
through the difficult struggle for, and the achievement of,
self-discovery. This is why, as Freud always insisted, the
Oedipus complex is central to psychoanalysis.
VI
Accepting the idea of the Oedipus complex without under-
standing the myth and the play from which it got its name
is one way of accepting psychoanalysis without trying to get
at its deeper meaning-just what Freud predicted would
happen in the United States. Since Freud's translators en-
visaged a large English and American readership, and since
American readers, at least, tend to be unfamiliar with most
of the story of Oedipus and Freud's other classical refer-
ences, it would have been helpful if the translators had made
some attempt to explain the meaning of Freud's allusions to
classical literature. It can be argued that translators ought to
concern themselves with rendering only what the author
wrote, as closely as the difference in languages permits. But
to deal accurately with a subject such as psychoanalysis, and
with language so carefully chosen for nuances as Freud's
was, translators need to be very sensitive not only to what
is written but also to what is implied. Their task very defi-
nitely includes an obligation to try to transmit not just the
words forming a sentence but also the meanings to which
these words allude. The translators must be responsive to
the author's efforts to speak also to the reader's sub-
conscious, to arouse an emotional response as well as an
intellectual one. In short, they must also translate the au-
thor's attempts to convey covert meanings.
I do not doubt that Freud's English translators wanted
to present his writings to their audience as accurately as
possible-in terms of the frame of reference within which

they wished him to be understood. When Freud appears to
be either more abstruse or more dogmatic in English transla-
tion than in the original German, to speak about abstract
concepts rather than about the reader himself, and about
man's mind rather than about his soul, the probable explana-
tion isn't mischievousness or carelessness on the translators'
part but a deliberate wish to perceive Freud strictly within
the framework of medicine, and, possibly, an unconscious
tendency to distance themselves from the emotional impact
of what Freud tried to convey.
The English translations cleave to an early stage of
Freud's thought, in which he inclined toward science and
medicine, and disregard the more mature Freud, whose ori-
entation was humanistic, and who was concerned mostly
with broadly conceived cultural and human problems and
with matters of the soul. Freud himself stated that he consid-
ered the cultural and human significance of psychoanalysis
more important than its medical significance.
In summing up, in the thirty-fourth of the New Introduc-
tory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933), what he viewed as the
main merits of psychoanalysis, Freud, while remarking on
its therapeutic successes, did not hide its limitations in this
respect; in fact, he admitted that he was never really enthusi-
astic about psychoanalysis as therapy. While psychoanalysis
is beyond doubt the most valuable method of psychother-
apy, that is only to be expected, since it is the most difficult,
demanding, and time-consuming method. Freud recom-
mended psychoanalysis to our interest "not as therapy "but
rather because of what it reveals to us about what concerns
man most closely: his own essence; and because of the con-
33
nections it uncovers between the widest variety of his ac-

tions." His greatest hope was that with the spreading of
psychoanalytic knowledge, and the insights gained through
it, the rearing of children would be reformed. Freud consid-
ered this "perhaps the most important of all activities of
analysis," because it could free the largest number of people
-not merely the few who underwent analysis personally-
from unnecessary repressions, unrealistic anxieties, and de-
structive hatreds. By vastly reducing the inner conflicts
from which we suffered, psychoanalysis could help us to act
more rationally-<:ould help us, in short, to become more
human. "Psychoanalysis is not a medical specialty," Freud
said in his "Postscript to 'The Qgestion of Lay Analysis' "
(1927). "I do not see how one can resist recognizing this.
Psychoanalysis is a part of psychology. It is not medical
psychology in the traditional sense, nor the psychology of
pathological processes. It is psychology proper; certainly
not all of psychology, but its substratum, possibly its very
foundation." He went on to warn that one should not per-
mit oneself to be led astray by its application for medical
purposes; he compared psychoanalysis to electricity, which
has its medical uses in the form of x-ray techniques, pointing
out that this does not make electricity become part of medi-
cine rather than part of physics.
Despite this clear-cut assertion, psychoanalysis was per-
ceived in the United States as a practice that ought to be the
sole prerogative of physicians, instead of being accepted for
what it is in the deepest and most important sense: a call to
greater humanity, and a way to achieve it. So adamant were
the American analysts that psychoanalysis must be restricted
to physicians that in 1926 the New York State Legislature
passed a bill declaring illegal any analysis not conducted

by a physician. Not satisfied with this, the Americans
continued their battle within the International Psycho-
Analytical Association, and threatened to break away from
the international psychoanalytic movement unless their
view was accepted. A struggle over this issue led to severe
dissensions within the International Psycho-Analytical As-
sociation, which lasted from 1926 until 1932, when Ernest
Jones, the chairman of a committee set up by the association
to deal with the problem, worked out a compromise, accord-
ing to which each of the national societies forming the inter-
national association would thereafter have the right to
determine the qualifications needed for membership. As a
result, the American analysts decided-very much against
Freud's strong convictions-that, as a general principle, in
the United States only physicians could become analysts.
The consequences of this action were to be far-reach-
ing, though nobody suspected as much at the time. When
Freud reluctantly acquiesced in the decision of the Ameri-
can analysts, the center of psychoanalysis was in Europe,
with the Viennese group around Freud clearly dominant.
All seven members of the "Committee" that directed the
psychoanalytic movement lived in Europe: Freud and
Otto Rank in Vienna; Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, and
Han,s Sachs in Berlin; Sandor Ferenczi in Budapest; and
Ernest Jones in London. No one imagined that the small
and relatively insignificant group of analysts in the United
States could have the slightest influence on the overall de-
velopment of psychoanalysis, since all theoretical and prac-
tical advances originated in the European centers, mainly
with Freud himself, his daughter Anna, and the other
members of the "Committee." With the advent of Hitler,
however, everything suddenly changed. Psychoanalysis
disappeared on the Continent, and after the war the
American psychoanalysts were the largest and most influ-
ential group, dominating the entire field. It is at the very
least doubtful that if Freud had foreseen this situation he
would have agreed that psychoanalysis in the United
States might become a medical specialty, since whenever
he had felt strongly about an issue he risked splits in the
psychoanalytic movement to assure its continuation in his
spirit.
The strength of Freud's conviction that psychoanalysis
should not exist solely within a medical framework can be
gauged from a 1928 letter to his friend Oskar Pfister. Refer-
ring to two of his recent books, The Q!testion of Lay Analysis
(1926), in which he had argued that psychoanalytically
trained laymen should be permitted to treat patients, and
The Future of an Illusion (1927), which dealt with the nature
of religious ideas, he wrote, "I do not know whether you
have guessed the hidden link between 'Lay Analysis' and
'Illusion.' In the former I want to protect analysis from
physicians, and in the latter from priests. I want to entrust
it to a profession that doesn't yet exist, a profession of secular
ministers of souls, who don't have to be physicians and must
not be priests.'" Psychoanalysis was to be neither a medical
discipline nor a creed. Psychoanalysts were not to think or
function as the healers of bodies do, nor were they to be
·What I have translated as "ministers of souls" is, in the original, Seelsorger_

term normally applied to priests and ministers. Freud used it in a broader sense,
Ii
combining Sttlt, which means "soul," and Sorger, which means "somebody who
ministers to needs."
purveyors of an esoteric or revealed truth. (Incidentally, in

its original American edition, published in 1927, the title of
The Question oj Lay Analysis-Die FTage deT Laienanalyse-
was mistranslated as The PToblem oj Lay-Analyses. By the
time the book was republished under its correct title, in 1947,
the damage was done.)
During the last months of Freud's life, when psychoanal-
ysis had almost ceased to exist on the continent of Europe,
it was widely rumored that he had changed his mind and
was of the opinion that the practice of psychoanalysis should
be confined to physicians. In answer to an inquiry on this
matter, he wrote (in English): "I cannot imagine how that
silly rumor of my having changed my views about the prob-
lem of Lay-Analysis may have originated. The fact is, I have
never repudiated these views and I insist on them even more
intensely than before, in the face of the obvious American
tendency to tum psychoanalysis into a mere housemaid of
Psychiatry. "
To characterize the function of the analyst-someone
who could greatly facilitate the emergence of a new person-
ality, making the process of the change a safe one-Freud
often used the simile of the midwife. As the midwife neither
creates the child nor decides what he will be but only helps
the mother to give birth to him safely, so the psychoanalyst
can neither bring the new personality into being nor deter-
mine what it ought to be; only the person who is analyzing
himself can make himself over. Others have also used the
image of the midwife to explain the work of psychoanalysis.
The poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), speaking of her experi-
ence with Freud during her analysis, said, "He is midwife
to the soul."
VII
In the Vienna of Freud's time, psychology was not a natural
science but a branch of philosophy; it was mainly specula-
tive and descriptive, and was essentially humanistic in con-
tent. Not until the Second World War did psychology in
Vienna move out of this frame of reference, and even then
it did so only slowly and tentatively, as psychologists began
to mimic students of the natural sciences in their methods
and their thinking.
How Freud conceived of p.sychology can be seen from
the way he spoke about it in The Qjlestion of Lay Analysis:
"In psychology we can describe only with the help of com-
parisons. This is nothing special, it is the same elsewhere.
But we are forced to change these comparisons over and
over again, for none of them can serve us for any length of
time." There are several reasons for Freud's frequent use of
metaphors in explaining the nature of psychoanalysis. One
is that psychoanalysis, though it is confronted with hard,
objective facts, does not deal with them as such but devotes
itself to the imaginative interpretation and explanation of
hidden causes, which can only be inferred. The metaphors
that Freud used were intended to bridge the rift that exists
between the hard facts to which psychoanalysis refers and
the imaginative manner in which it explains them. A second
reason is even more closely related to the nature of psycho-
analysis. Because of repression, or the influence of censor-
ship, the unconscious reveals itself in symbols or metaphors,
and psychoanalysis, in its concern with the unconscious,

tries to speak about it in its own metaphoric language. Fi-
nally, metaphors are more likely than a purely intellectual
statement to touch a human chord and arouse our emotions,
and thus give us a feeling for what is meant. A true compre-
hension of psychoanalysis requires not only an intellectual
realization but a simultaneous emotional response; neither
alone will do. A well-chosen metaphor will permit both.
Because poets speak in metaphors about the contents of
their unconscious, Freud insisted that they, and other great
artists, knew all along what he had to discover through
laborious work. Throughout his psychoanalytic writings,
Freud discussed works of art-and literature in an attempt
to appeal to our intuitions, to engage both our uncon-
scious and our conscious understanding. He often quoted
Goethe, Shakespeare, and other poets, as well as such writ-
ers as Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Arthur Schnitzler, and
he maintained that they knew everything that needs to be
known about the unconscious. All he claimed for himself
was that he had organized this knowledge and made it
available as a means of understanding the unconscious not
only intuitively but also explicitly. Freud rarely quoted
natural scientists, not to mention physicians; the only ex-
ceptions were his fellow psychoanalysts who were also
physicians, and whom he had taught psychoanalysis in the
first place.
Freud relished anecdotes and jokes, particularly Jewish
jokes, because they were so pregnant with unconscious
meanings. Like metaphors, jokes suggest rather than an-
nounce their meaning, and they invite the initiated to specu-
late about their unconscious origin. Freud devoted one of his
39
major works to showing how cleverly, concisely, and amus-

ingly jokes allow us deep insights into man's unconscious,
and he used jokes for this purpose elsewhere in his writings.
(Many of the Jewish jokes that were very popular with the
Viennese intelligentsia in Freud's day asserted their clever-
ness while at the same time making fun of it, thus blunting
the effect of their claim to superiority. The anti-Semitism
that was rampant in Vienna aroused strong feelings among
the Jewish population, feelings it may have been unwise to
show openly, and Jewish jokes often permitted the ventila-
tion of these feelings; they were often metaphors for the true
feelings of Viennese Jews.)
For these and many parallel reasons, it is important, if we
wish to understand Freud, to pay close attention to his use
of metaphors, whether or not he makes it obvious that he is
speaking metaphorically; it is equally important that we not
take his metaphors as factual statements.,
Of all the metaphors that Freud used, probably none had
more far-reaching consequences than the metaphor of men-
tal illness, and-derived from it-the metaphor of psycho-
analysis as the treatment and cure of mental illness. Freud
evoked the image of illness and its treatment to enable us to
comprehend how certain disturbances influence the psyche,
what causes them, and how they may be dealt with. If-this
metaphor is not recognized as such but, rather, taken as
referring to objective facts, we forfeit a real understanding
of the unconscious and its workings. In this metaphor, the
body stands for the soul. If the metaphor is interpreted
literally, as it has been in the United States, our psyche, or
soul-for Freud the terms were interchangeable-seems to
become something tangible. It acquires something akin to a
physical existence, like a bodily organ; hence its treatment

becomes part of medical science.
In the United States, of course, "the cure of mental
illness" has been seen as the main task of psychoanalysis, just
as the curing of bodily illness is that of medicine. It is ex-
pected that anyone undergoing psychoanalysis will achieve
tangible results-the kind of results the physician achieves
for the body-rather than a deeper understanding of himself
and greater control of his life. In 1949 one of America's
foremost psychologists declared at a meeting of the Ameri-
can Psychological Association that, of all the features of
Freudian theory, the mechanisms of adjustment had become
the most widely accepted in the United States. This remark-
able statement reveals the nature of American acceptance of
psychoanalysis, particularly since Freud cared little about
"adjustment" and did not consider it valuable. What is true,
and what this American spokesman for psychoanalysis
should have said, is that the concept of adjustment was
injected into the Freudian system because it was of primary
importance in the American psychoanalysts' scheme of
values, and that this alteration explains the widespread
acceptance of psychoanalysis in America. If American psy-
choanalysts had shared Freud's concern for the soul, and his
disregard for adaptation or adjustment to the requirements
of society, then the history of psychoanalysis in the United
States would be entirely different, si~ce psychoanalysis
would have had to transcend the narrow confines of medi-
cine. But, of course, if this had happened, psychoanalysis
might not have been successful in the United States.
In the German culture within which Freud lived, and
which permeated his work, there existed and still exists a
definite and important division between two approaches to
knowledge. Both disciplines are called Wissenscbaften
(sciences), and they are accepted as equally legitimate in
their appropriate fields, although their methods have hardly
anything in common. These two are the Naturwissenscbaften
(natural sciences) and, opposed to them in content and in
methods, the Geirteswissenscbaften. The term Geisteswissen-
scbaften defies translation into English; its literal meaning is
"sciences of the spirit," and the concept is one that is deeply
rooted in German idealist philosophy. These disciplines rep-
resent entirely different approaches to an understanding of
the world. Renan, trying to translate them into French,
suggested that they divided all knowledge into la science de
l'bumanit~ and la science de la nature. In such a division of
knowledge, a hermeneutic-spiritual knowing and a positiv-
istic-pragmatic knowing are opposed to each other. In much
of the German world, and particularly in Vienna before and
during Freud's life, psychology clearly fell into the realm of
the first; in much of the English-speaking world, on the
other hand, psychology clearly belonged to the Naturwis-
senscbaften.
The influential German philosopher Wilhelm Windel-
band, Freud's contemporary, elaborated on the fundamental
differences between these two approaches to knowledge. He
classified the natural sciences as nomothetic, because they
search for and are based on general laws, and in many of
them mathematics plays an important role. The Geisteswis-
senscbaften he called idiographic, because they seek to under-
stand the objects of their study not as instances of universal
laws but as singular events; their method is that of history,
since they are concerned with human history and with indi-
vidual ideas and values. Nomothetic sciences require verifi-

cation through replication by experiment; their findings
ought to permit mathematical and statistical analysis and,
most important, ought to permit exact predictions. Idio-
graphic sciences deal with events that never recur in the
same form-that can be neither replicated nor predicted.
Psychoanalysis is concerned with the discovery of events
in the past life of the individual and with their consequences
for him, and neither the events nor the consequences can
ever be exactly the same for two persons. Freud frequently
compared psychoanalysis with archeology: the work of psy-
choanalysis consists in unearthing the deeply buried rem-
nants of the past and combining them with other fragments
that are more accessible; once all the pieces hilVe been put
together, it becomes possible to speculate about the origin
and the nature of the individual psyche.
While Freud's vocation was psychoanalysis, his avoca-
tion was archeology. He read widely in both archeology and
history, and little in the natural sciences. As I mentioned
earlier, Freud avidly collected ancient Greek, Roman, and
Egyptian antiques; he bought them even when the expense
was burdensome. His treatment room and the desk at which
he did all his writing were crowded with these antiques.
During treatment he would sometimes use one of them to
make a point, handing it to his patient to help him better
understand a particular idea about the unconscious. These
antiques were so important to Freud that he refused to leave
Nazi-occupied Vienna, where his life was in danger, until
he was assured that his collection could leave with him.
It is clear that Freud was deeply interested in prehistory:
the prehistory of the modem world, which he sought to
43
discover in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the prehis-

tory of individual man, for which he searched in the child-
hood of the individual and in the individual's unconscious;
the prehistory of the human race, which he sought to under-
stand through the customs of primitive man; the prehistory
of culture, for which he searched in totems and taboos, and
in the role of Moses in the creation of monotheism. There
can be little doubt that when he spoke of his Wissenscbaft,
psychoanalysis, Freud meant the study of the sources of
humanity in all its various forms.
Psychoanalysis is plainly an idiographic science, utiliz-
ing unique historical occurrences to provide a view of man's
development and behavior. Whether Freud analyzes his
dreams, which are unique to him, or establishes the past
history of patients, or discusses what constitutes the essence
of a work of art and how it relates to the life and personality
of the artist, or analyzes the origin of religion or rituals, the
psychology of masses, or the basis of society or of mono-
theism, he is working within the framework of the Geistes-
wissenscbaften, applying the methods appropriate to an
idiographic science.
When the English-speaking reader is confronted with
the word "science," however, he thinks of the natural
sciences; and when he is confronted with the word "psy-
chology" he is likely to think of it as a discipline that tries
to be an exact science; that is, a science based on controlled
experiments that can be replicated and studied statistically.
If the conviction that psychoanalysis belongs to the field of
medicine is added to this notion (wasn't Freud a physician
who treated patients, and isn't the practice of psychoanalysis
restricted to physicians?), it seems logical to interpret what
Freud wrote as part of a natural science, and to translate his

writings accordingly.
In such a frame of mind, a translator of Freud will try
to use precise terms, and make things clear and definite,
however much treatises centering on the unconscious in all
its manifestations may defy such efforts. If the translator is
confronted with newly created terms that as yet have no
English equivalent, he may translate them by creating new
terms of his own, which permit clear definitions rather than
evoke vague and emotionally loaded connotations, for he
may believe Freud to have thought of or wished for such
precision when he created his new terms. A translation pre-
pared in this manner will then add to the impression that
Freud's system is one of the natural sciences.
Such methods of translation are reinforced by the fact
that English scientific writing requires a degree of clarity
and definiteness that German writing does not. A type of
expression that in English would be scorned as muddle-
headed and confused is quite acceptable in German. While
English authors, particularly in scientific writings, shun am-
biguities, German writing is full of them. Psychoanalytic
writing, which is concerned to such a large degree with the
unconscious-itself full of ambiguities and contradictions-
will in German try to do them justice, while good English
style requires that such ambiguities be avoided. In theory,
many topics with which Freud dealt permit both a her-
meneutic-spiritual and a positivistic-pragmatic approach.
When this is so, the English translators nearly always opt for
the latter, positivism being the most important English phil-
osophical tradition.
This is not to say that those who wish to see Freud as
4S
a natural scientist, and psychoanalysis as a medical specialty,

won't find some justification for their views in certain things
he said. Freud was not a psychoanalyst all his life; he came
to psychoanalysis in his forties. His pre-psychoanalytic
work was in physiology and medicine. While studying
physiology at the University of Vienna, Freud was much
impressed by the scientific rigor that his mentors demon-
strated and also demanded of others; he therefore made their
methods and values his own. He continued to adhere to
these for a time after he decided to become a physician in
private practice, specializing in neurology. His attitudes
changed only gradually.
Freud spoke in some detail about his desire at one time
to devote his life to physiological research, in which he bad
been quite successful. He said he gave it up only for eco-
nomic reasons. Both his character and his life history sug-
gest, however, that economics cannot have been the full
explanation; it may instead have been a convenient rationali-
zation, which the claim that one does things for economic
rewards often is. Freud wrote, too, about his failure to be
recognized as the discoverer of the medicinal uses of co-
caine. Yet he deprived himself of the credit for this great
discovery when at a crucial moment in his research he left
Vienna to visit his fiancee, whom he had managed quite well
not to visit on other occasions. His actions in this instance
make it seem that he unconsciously wished to give up his
research career.
Freud was a very complex person, a man whose own
inner conflicts prompted his self-analysis-the process
through which he discovered psychoanalysis. It was this, his
self-analysis, that was Freud's great transformation. His
ideas underwent far-reaching evolutions in this process, and

he therefore said different things about psychoanalysis at
different times. But the various statements Freud made
about the depth of his commitment to the natural sciences
and their methods-statements he certainly believed at the
time he made them~become open to question when one
considers his humanism and his application of idiographic
principles to the phenomena he tried to bring into his own
and our understanding.
Much has been written about the significant role that'
Freud's intimate friendship with Wilhelm Fliess played in
Freud's self-analysis. Fliess, a nose and throat specialist, was,
like Freud, deeply interested in the profound importance of
sexuality in man's life. Fliess was convinced that periodicity
determines all biological processes, including birth, illness,
and death. To prove this, he applied the most abstract disci-
pline-mathematics-to the study of biology, making his
mathematical speculations the basis for understanding all
physiological processes. Freud tried to follow his friend's
reasonings, but could never bring himself to do so fully.
During his self-analysis, Freud was veering ever further
away from the exact sciences. In one of his letters to Fliess,
he wrote, "When there are two people, one of whom can
say what life is, the other (almost) what the soul is, it is only
right that they should see each other and talk together
often." In this way, Freud distinguished between his own
work, the study of the soul, and Fliess's work in the natural
sciences.
As his self-analysis proceeded, Freud increasingly dis-
tanced himself from the natural sciences and from Fliess; in
the end, he broke with Fliess completely. Nobody actually
47
replaced Fliess as Freud's confidant and most intimate

friend, but shortly after the break with Fliess, Freud began
to correspond regularly and frequently with C. G. Jung.
Like Fliess, Jung was a physician, but he was also a psy-
choanalyst and, as his later work shows, he was fascinated
by myths and prehistory. These topics occupied Freud's
mind a great deal, too, of course, and although his attitude
toward and interest in religion were very different from
Jung's, they both studied religion from a psychological
point of view. Freud's shift from Fliess to Jung might be
seen as a step in his inner development away from biology
and toward the study of the soul.
Another example of how Freud moved away from the
idea that psychoanalysis could be an exact science, permit-
ting replication and predictions characteristic of the hard
sciences, can be found in the evolution of his views on dream
symbolism. In 19[3, he wrote, in the paper "The Interest of
Psychoanalysis," that psychoanalysts were "able to some
extent to translate the content of dreams independently of
the dreamer's associations." That is, Freud believed then
that his "science" enabled him to say with some certainty
what the appearance of a symbol in the dream of any patient
meant. In [925, in the paper "Some Additional Notes on
Dream-Interpretation as a Whole," he wrote: "Dream inter-
pretation ... without reference to the dreamer's associations
would . . . remain a piece of unscientific virtuosity of the
most doubtful value." He had decided that to different
persons the same symbol could have entirely different im-
plications-that only a study of the individual's unique
associations to a symbol permitted understanding of what it
signified. He had become convinced that each psychological
event had its own unique history, existed within a unique

context, and could be understood only in that context.
Later, Freud realized even more clearly that the natural
sciences had been a detour from what he really wanted to
do with his life. In The Q1lestion of Lay Analysis, he wrote,
"After forty-one years of medical activities, my self-knowl-
edge tells me that I have not been a physician in the proper
sense. I became a physician through being compelled to
deviate from my original intention; and the triumph of my
life lies in my having, after a great detour, found my way
back to my original direction." Freud explained what this
original direction was in his "Postscript to 'An Autobio-
graphical Study' " (1935):
After a lifelong detour over the natural sciences,

medicine, and psychotherapy, my interests returned
to those cultural problems which had once captivated
the youth who had barely awakened to deeper
thought. These interests had centered on "the events
of the history of man, the mutual influences between
man's nature, the development of culture, and those
residues of prehistoric events of which religion is the
foremost representation ... studies which originate
in psychoanalysis but go way beyond it."
Even before Freud stated so explicitly that it was not the

natural sciences or medicine that stood at the center of his
interests, an Englishman who considered himself a hard-
nosed scientist recognized that Freud's primary commit-
ment was to the humanities. Wilfred Trotter, whom Freud
had extensively quoted in his book Group Psychology and the
49
Analysis of the Ego (1921), wrote, "However much one may

be impressed by the greatness of the edifice which Freud has
built up and by the soundness of his architecture, one can
scarcely fail, on coming into it from the bracing atmosphere
of the biological sciences, to be oppressed by the odour of
humanity with which it is pervaded."
The issue that concerns me here is not whether or in
what measure Freud saw himself at certain moments in his
life as a natural scientist, and psychoanalysis as a natural
science-for sometimes he did. My point is to question
whether his English translators and, consequently, Ameri-
can students of psychoanalysis were not and are not led
astray by Freud's statements along these lines to miscon-
ceive much else that he wrote, in which he clearly wanted
us to accept psychoanalysis as a humanistic undertaking.
VIII
Most of Freud's writings were published in English during
his lifetime, and all existing translations of his work into
English were authorized either by Freud himself or by his
estate. Since Freud read and wrote English fluently, it is
hard to understand how he could have permitted transla-
tions that are faulty in both word and spirit, and that seri-
ously impede readers' efforts to gain a true understanding of
his work.
I first read Freud systematically in English translation in
the late 1940s, when some of my friends and colleagues at the

University of Chicago became involved in preparing the
Encyclopaedia Britannica publication Great Books of the
Western World, the fifty-fourth and final volume of which
was to be devoted entirely to Freud's writings. When con-
sulted about which of his works should be included in this
volume, I suggested that new translations were needed that
would be more faithful both to what Freud actually wrote
and to what he tried to convey. My arguments-based not
only on my reading of Freud in English but also on what
I had learned about the inability of my students and the staff
of the Orthogenic School to comprehend Freud in transla-
tion-must have been fairly convincing. For a while, the
editors considered commissioning new translations of
the works selected. But in the end, time was too short, the
expense too great, and there was small likelihood that
Freud's heirs would give their permission.
A few years later, I was approached by one of the direc-
tors of a large foundation and offered the opportunity of
preparing a new, annotated translation of Freud's writings.
I was not inclined to accept this challenging offer because
the task would have consumed the rest of my life, because
I doubted the adequacy of my skills, and because I was
deeply involved in the work of the Orthogenic School.
There was also the familiar problem of whether the holders
of the publishing rights would permit the publication ofa
new translation, particularly since an authorized edition of
Freud's complete writings was already in preparation.
The twenty-four-volume Standard Edition of the Com-
plete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud was published in
London by the Hogarth Press, and appeared between 1953
and 1974. The general editor of the series, James Strachey,
had undergone analysis with Freud in Vienna after the First
World War and had translated several of his works into
English during Freud's lifetime. For the Standard Edition,
Strachey either revised existing translations or, in some
cases, provided completely new translations of his own. All
the translations had the approval of Anna Freud. Because
the translations in the Standard Edition are for the most part
an improvement on those in the earlier edition~alth()ugh
many, many shortcomings remain-all discussions pre-
sented here are based on this edition. (It should be noted,
too, that the overwhelming majority of Americans who
read Freud do not read the Standard Edition but a vari-
ety of cheaper editions that reprint the earlier, inferior
translations. )
The translators' tendency to replace words in ordinary
use with medical terms and learned borrowings from the
Greek and Latin is evident throughout the Standard Edition.
In the tenth chapter of the Introductory Lectures on Psycho-
analysis (1916-17), in which Freud discusses the meaning of
symbols in dreams, he writes, "That the oven is [a symbol
of] a woman and womb is confirmed by the Greek legend
of Periander and his wife, Melissa" ("Dass der Ofen ein Weib
und Mutterleib ist, wird uns durch die griechische Sage von
Periander von Korintb und seiner Frau Melissa bestiitigt ").
This is rendered in the Standard Edition as "That ovens
represent women and the uterus is confirmed by ..." There
are several difficulties here. The seemingly innocuous
change from "the oven" and "a woman" to "ovens" and
"women" not only is gratuitous but may make the statement
untrue. I have encountered quite a few dreams in which an
oven or a stove stood for a woman or for the womb, but I

have never heard of a dream in which ovens represented
either women or wombs in the plural. Far worse, of course,
is the translation of "womb" as "uterus." I have certainly
never encountered a dream in which an oven stood for a
uterus, nor have any of my psychoanalyst friends. But even
in the unlikely event that such dreams may occur, this is not
what Freud had in mind. Though in English "womb" and
"uterus" can be used interchangeably, Mutterleib ("mother's
womb") can be translated only as "womb." The wish to
substitute a medical term for a word in ordinary use leads
to the replacement of a word that has deep emotional as-
sociations with one that evokes hardly any. Who would
want to return to a uterus?
Freud chose the title "Die Zerlegung der Psycbiscben Per-
sonlicbkeit" for the thirty-first chapter of his New Introduc-
tory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. A literal translation of this
title is "The Taking Apart of the Psychic Personality."
Within the context of the title, Zerlegung ("taking apart")
could be more colloquially rendered as "analysis" or "divi-
sion." In the Standard Edition this chapter is called "The
Anatomy of the Mental Personality." Nothing in the origi-
nal suggests the possibility of translating Zerlegung as "anat-
omy," ·nor does German usage permit such translation. The
word "anatomy" (Anatomie) is used as frequently in Ger-
man as it is in English, and it has the same meaning in both
languages. Freud, who studied anatomy as a medical stu-
dent, would have used this word if this is what he had had
in mind. The translators' choice of this word reflects their
preference for using medical terms.
Only the wish to perceive psychoanalysis as a medical
53
specialty can explain why three of Freud's most important

new theoretical concepts were translated not into English
but into a language whose most familiar use today may be
for writing prescriptions. Freud conceptualized the organi-
zation of the psyche by dividing its functioning into the
realms of the conscious, the preconscious, and the uncon-
scious. The psychological processes he discusses are per-
sonal and internal. In naming two of the concepts, Freud
chose words that are among the first words used by every
German child. To refer to the unknown, unconscious con-
tents of the mind, he chose the personal pronoun "it" (eJ)
and used it as a noun (das Es). But the meaning of the terlll
"the it" gained its full impact only after Freud used it in
conjunction with the pronoun" I" (ieb), also used as a noun
(das feb). His intended meanings found their clear expres-
sion in the title of the book-Das leb und lias Es-in which
he defined these two concepts for the first time, as counter-
parts of each other. The translation of these personal pro-
nouns into their Latin equivalents-the "ego" and the "id"
-rather than their English ones turned them into cold tech-
nical terms, which arouse no personal associations. In Ger-
man, of course, the pronouns are invested with deep
emotional significance, for the readers have used them all
their lives; Freud's careful and original choice of words
facilitated an intuitive understanding of his meaning.
No word has greater and more intimate connotations
than the pronoun "I." It is one of the most frequently used
words in spoken language-and, more important, it is the
most personal word. To mistranslate lcb as "ego" is to trans-
form it into jargon that no longer conveys the personal
commitment we make when we say "I" or "me"-not to
mention our subconscious memories of the deep emotional

experience we had when, in infancy, we discovered our-
selves as we learned to say "I." I do not know whether Freud
was familiar with Ortega y Gasset's statement that to create
a concept is to leave reality behind, but he was certainly
aware of its truth and tried to avoid this danger as much as
possible. In creating the concept of the [ch, he tied it to
reality by using a term that made it practically impossible to
leave reality behind. Reading or speaking about the I forces
one to look at oneself introspectively. By contrast, an "ego"
that uses clear-cut mechanisms, such as displacement and
projection, to achieve its purpose in its struggle against the
"id" is something that can be studied from the outside, by
observing others. With this inappropriate and-as far as our
emotional response to it is concerned-misleading transla-
tion, an introspective psychology is made into a behavioral
one, which observes from the outside. This, of course, is
exactly how most Americans view and use psychoanalysis.
The word "ego" was used in the English language in a
number of ways long before Freud's translators introduced
it as a psychoanalytic concept. These uses, which are still
part of the living language, are all pejorative, such as "ego-
ism," "egoistic," and "egotism." (A slang expression of
more recent origin-"ego trip"-is also pejorative.) This is
likewise true of their German cognates-the noun Egoist
and the adjective egoistisch. Freud, like all German-speaking
people, was, of course, familiar with the derogatory conno-
tation of selfishness that the root "ego" evokes.
When Freud named one of his major concepts the I, he
brought his theories about the workings of the human psy-
che as close to us, his readers, as is possible through a choice
55
of words. If anything, the German reb is invested with

stronger and deeper personal meaning than the English "I."
When a speaker of English wishes to emphasize personal
commitment, he is apt to use "me" rather than "I." For
example, he'll say, "That's me," whereas in German one
would use "I," as in "reb bin es, der spriebt" ("That's me
talking"). For that matter, a good case could be made that
in some contexts "the me" might render Freud's meaning
better than "the I." Where Freud selected a word that, used
in daily parlance, makes us feel vibrantly alive, the transla-
tions present us with a term from a dead language that reeks
of erudition precisely when it should emanate vitality.
The asseniveness we often feel when we say "I" is an
image of how the person's I tries to assen its will over what
. in the translations are called the "id" and "superego," and
over the external world. This image gets lost when we talk
about an ego. When I say "I," I mean my entire self, my
total personality. Freud, it is true, made an imponant dis-
tinction here. What he called the "I" refers primarily to the
conscious, rational aspects of oneself. In a way, we know
that we are not always reasonable and do not always act
rationally; psychoanalysis, more than any other discipline,
makes us aware of the irrational, unconscious aspects of our
mind. So, when Freud names the reasonable, conscious as-
pects of our mind the I, we feel subtly flattered that our real
I is what we value most highly in ourselves. It gives us the
intuitive feeling that Freud is right to name the I what we
feel to be our true self, even though we know that we do not
always act in line with that self. Since that pan of us, psy-
choanalytically speaking, is named the I, we are enticed to
side with it in its struggle against the irrational, infantile,
entirely selfish aspects of ourselves. In a subtle way, this

choice of name for the conscious aspects of our mind
strengthens our determination to win the battle against the
chaos caused by the irrational in us. During psychoanalytic
treatment, that determination-that siding of the patient's
I with the efforts of the therapist-alone can lead to suc-
cess in dealing with the dark forces within us. The I, more
than any other term of psychoanalysis, encourages us to
make the unconscious become conscious and to think psy-
choanalytically.
We find it easy to say, "I won't any longer be run by my
irrational anxieties," and when we say it after becoming
acquainted with psychoanalytic thinking we know that this
I about which we speak is essentially only our conscious
mind, which tries to control the anxious outcroppings of our
unconscious. Nobody can say, "My ego won't any longer
be run by irrational anxieties," and mean it. When we say,
"I am trying to understand why 1 did this," our whole being
is involved in the effort, although we know that it is our
rational mind alone that is trying to understand why some
unconscious pressure made us do something. In the most
unlikely event that somebody said, "My ego is trying to
understand why I did this," no feeling of personal involve-
ment would be communicated.
"Ego" and "id" are part of a theoretical lingo, but the
main purpose of psychoanalysis is to help us deal with the
least theoretical aspects of our mind-with that in us which
is most primitive, most irrational, and can be expressed, if at
all, only in the most ordinary, least complicated language.
The distinction between the I and the it is immediately clear
to us, and hardly needs psychoanalytic explanation, since we
57
are aware of it from our way of talking about ourselves. For
example, when we say, "I went there," we know exactly
what we were doing and why we did it. But when we say
"It pulled me in that direction," we express the feeling that
something in us-we don't know what-forced us to behave
in a certain way. When a person suffering from depression
says "It got me again" or "It makes life unbearable!" he gives
clear expression to his feeling that neither his intellect nor
his conscious mind nor his will accounts for what is happen-
ing to him-that he has been overcome by forces within him
which are beyond his ken and his control.
Still, even "the it" does not have the full emotional im-
pact that das Es has in the original German. In German, the
word "child" (das Kind) is of neuter gender. During their
early years, all Germans have the experience of being re-
ferred to by means of the neuter pronoun es. This fact gives
the phrase das Es a special feeling, reminding the German
reader that this is how he was referred to before he learned
to repress many of his sexual, aggressive, and otherwise
asocial impulses, before he felt guilty or ashamed because of
them, before he felt an obligation to resolve contradictions
and bring logical order into his thoughts; in short, it reminds
him of a time when his entire existence was dominated by
the it. These memories, even when he is not conscious of
them, permit a much more immediate empathy with what
Freud meant when he used this term for the unconscious.
The concept of the UbeT-leb, which Freud also intro-
duced in Das leb und dar Er, and which has become known
to English readers as the "superego," combines two every-
day German words. It is the second part of his compound
noun that gives it its main significance, by emphasizing the
point that the concept denotes an integral part of the person

-a controlling and often overcontrolling institution of the
mind which is created by the person himself out of inner
needs and external pressures that have been internalized.
The preposition abeT ("above," "over") removes the realm
of the Uber-leb from the sphere of the lebo
As it happens, the English mistranslation of the above-I
soon became accepted and is now used in English more
easily and frequently than either "ego" or "id." People who
hardly ever speak about egos or ids do not hesitate to talk
about their or others' superegos. The reason may be that
there had been no name for that which includes not just the
"conscience"-for this the old word did admirably well-
but also that wider aspect of the psyche which comprises
both its conscious and fairly reasonable controlling aspects
and its unconscious, unreasonable, compulsive, punitive,
and persecutory aspects.
In Freud's system, the I, the it, and the above-I are but
different aspects of our psyche, each of them inextricably
and permanently related to one another; they cannot be
separated from each other except in theory. Each of them,
in its own way, exercises an important and different-albeit
overlapping-function in the psyche. In English transla-
tion, it is not so much the "super" in "superego" that inter-
feres with an emotional understanding of its meaning and
its role in Freud's system; the problem, as before, is with the
term "ego." The function of Ieb as part of UbeT-Ieb is to
communicate as directly as a word can the idea that it is the
person himself who created this controlling institution of his
mind, that the above-I is the result of his own experiences,
desires, needs, and anxieties, as they have been interpreted
59
by him, and that this institution attained its role of power

because he, the person, internalized in its contents the de-
mands he made-and continues to make-of himself.
Through such a personal realization, it is readily understood
that others have done the same, and that the above-I plays
the same role in their psyches. Had "I" been retained as the
most significant part of the name given to what was instead
misnamed "superego," a reader would find it much easier to
get an immediate feeling that it is he who has to contend
with this part of his psyche. All that the qualifying part of
the compound word needs to convey is that it refers to those
aspects of the psyche which attempt to rule the person
through a claim of higher authority. In this respect, "above-
I," "over-I," "upper-I," and other, similar terms would all
be acceptable translations of Uber-lcb. "Upper-I" might
even come closest to the meaning Freud had in mind. One
of the definitions of "upper" given in Webster's New World
Dictionary of tbe American Language (henceforth referred to
as Webster's) is "higher in authority, something above an-
other similar thing, or a related part." We are all familiar
with the concept of an upper house, which has (usually)
greater authority than a lower house. The connotations of
a location that is higher up, and at the same time superior
and of a higher authority, are exactly those that made Freud
choose the word ilber.
Translations of Freud into languages other than English
show that there was no compelling reason-except an un-
conscious desire to create emotional distance from the im-
pact that personal pronouns have, or to use as much as
possible the special language of medicine-for having re-
course to Latin pronouns in translating into English the
German pronouns that Freud used. In French translations

of Freud, das feb is nearly always rendered as Ie moi; das Es
is rendered as Ie fa or Ie soi; and the Uber-feb is Ie surmai.
In Spanish, das feb is translated as el yo.
In The Q1lestion of Lay Analysis, Freud defended his use
of personal pronouns in naming the different aspects of the
psyche, and gave his reasons for rejecting words of a classical
language for this purpose. Speaking to an imaginary inter-
locutor, he wrote:
You will probably object to our having chosen

simple pronouns to denote our two institutions, or
provinces, of the soul, instead of introducing for
them sonorous Greek names. In psychoanalysis,
however, we like to keep in contact with the popular
mode of thinking and prefer to make its concepts
scientifically serviceable rather than to discard them.
There is no special merit in this; we must proceed in
this way because our teachings ought to be compre-
hensible to our patients who are often very intelli-
gent, but not always learned. The impersonal "it" is
immediately connected with certain expressions
used by normal persons. One is apt to say, "It came
to me in a flash; there was something in me which,
at that moment, was stronger than me." "C'etait plus
fort que moi. "
In the paragraph preceding the one just quoted, Freud

explained that he chose to name one of the concepts the I
because of the common connotations that are attached to
this pronoun. He wrote:
We base ourselves on common knowledge and
recognize in man an organization of the soul which
is interpolated between the stimulation of his senses
and the perception of his bodily needs on the one
hand, and his motor acts on the other, and which
mediates between them for a particular purpose. We
call this organization his I. Now there is nothing new
in this; each of us makes this assumption without
being a philosopher, and some although they are
philosophers. But we don't believe that by recogniz-
ing this part of the apparatus of the soul we have
exhausted the description. Besides the I we recognize
also another region of the soul, more extensive,
grander, and more obscure than the I, and this we
call the it.
Nietzsche, who indeed used the words "I" and "it" in

a similar way, may be one of the philosophers Freud alluded
to here. In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche wrote, "A
thought comes when 'it' wants to and not when 'I' want;
thus it is a falsification to say: the subject 'I' is the condition
for the predicate 'think.' It thinks: but there is ... no imme-
diate certainty that this 'it' is just that famous old 'I.' "
Late in his life, Freud updated his thoughts on the
structure of the human psyche in the thirty-first of the
New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. At its con-
clusion, he summed up the purpose of psychoanalysis as
theory and as therapy with the statement "Where it was,
there should become I." By this he did not mean that the
I should eliminate the it or take over the it's place in our
psyche, since according to his theoretical constructs the it
is the source of our vital energy, without which life itself

could not continue. ("The it cannot be controlled beyond
certain limits," Freud wrote in Civilization and Its Discon-
tents. "If more is demanded of a man, a revolt will be pro-
duced in him or a neurosis, or he will be made unhappy.")
Freud's stat~ment in the Ne'W Introductory Lectures was
meant to indicate that in some instances, with respect to
certain aspects of life that have been previously dominated
entirely or largely by the it, the I ought to exercise its
constructive influence and successfully control the unde-
sirable outcroppings of the it. The task of psychoanalysis is
thus to allow the I to make additional inroads into the vast
realm of the it, and to help the I gain ascendancy particu-
larly over those aspects of the it which can disturb the per-
son's well-being.
It was so important to Freud to make clear what he
meant by his statement about the goal of psychoanalysis
that he followed it with one final paragraph, consisting of
a single sentence: "It is a cultural achievement somewhat
like the draining of the Zuyder Zee." This is an especially
apt simile. The reclamation of the Zuyder Zee area in-
volved controlling, damming up, and draining a fairly
large inlet of the North Sea. The sea is a primordial, domi-
nant element of the natural world, comparable to the it in
the world of the psyche. The sea is not only the element in
which all life began, but it is necessary for life's continu-
ance. When the Zuyder Zee project was completed, only a
tiny part of the vast North Sea had been pushed back. The
project has remained a precarious achievement, because the
reclaimed land has to be continuously protected against
renewed flooding. A furious onslaught of the elements,
such as a huge tidal w~ve, could undo much of what
has been accomplished. The parallels here to the it in
relation to the I, and to the work of psychoanalysis, are
obvious.
The draining of the Zuyder Zee was a technical
achievement, and in order to make it suitable as a meta-
phor for what he had in mind, Freud added an important
qualification. He declared it a cultural achievement. He
used the word Kulturarbeit, which means, literally, "labor
to achieve culture." In the Standard Edition this term is
rendered as "reclamation work." By no stretch of the
imagination can "reclamation work" be viewed as an ap-
propriate translation of Kulturarbeit. If Freud had not
wished to evoke the work done at the Zuyder Zee in a
particular metaphoric sense, but had wished simply to
refer to its nature and purpose, he would have used the
word Urbarmacbung, which is the correct German expres-
sion for the reclamation of land for agricultural purposes.
But Freud was not concerned with comparing psychoanal-
ysis to the work of reclamation; on the contrary, he
wanted psychoanalysis to be compared to the wresting
away from primordial elements of areas that could be made
available for cultural achievement. In his metaphor, Freud
wished to stress that the work of psychoanalysis is
spiritual, as distinguished from physical or material work.
The English translation gives the metaphor the opposite
meaning and makes it seem that the purpose of psy-
choanalytic work is to gain practical results. Whatever
practical benefits may be derived from psychoanalysis,
they are only incidental to its cultural achievements, which

were paramount to Freud, and on which he rested his case.
For those familiar with German culture there is a spe-
cial poignancy in Freud's summing up the essence of psy-
choanalysis with a metaphor based on the reclamation of
land from the sea. In the history of German culture no-
body looms larger than Goethe, whose masterpiece is
Faust. The story of Faust is that of a battle for his soul
between the forces of light and darkness. His life is a strug-
gle for a deeper understanding of the world and himself.
To discover who he is, Faust is willing to risk everything
-his life, even his soul. In Faust's struggle, his better self
is in conflict with powerful and sometimes overwhelming
instinctual pressures (embodied in Mephistopheles) that
lead to the destruction of what he loves most (embodied in
Gretchen). Gretchen represents Faust's better self; it is she,
and what she represents, that saves Faust's soul. At the end
of his life, Faust views the reclamation of a piece of land
from the sea as the crowning achievement of his strivings.
Believing that he has achieved this work, he is contented
and ready to end his restless life. Because of his efforts to
create new land for future cultivation, he finds salvation.
Since we know that Goethe played a dominant role in
Freud's intellectual development, it is not mere speculation
that Freud selected the metaphor of the reclamation of
land from the sea because it would induce the reader to
relate the work of psychoanalysis to Faust, the great poem
about the reclamation of the soul. The image of the saving
of the soul is one without which neither the pantheist
Goethe nor the atheist Freud felt able to convey his deep-
est thoughts about man's destiny.
IX
The most important of Freud's psychoanalytic works is The
Interpretation of Dreams. In this book he tried to elucidate
what goes on in our unconscious and our dreams, and he
proved the truth of Shakespeare's statement that "we are
such stuff as dreams are made on." Unfortunately, begin-
ning with the title, mistranslations hamper our grasp of this
important work.
The Interpretation of Dreams, while not literally an incor-
rect translation of Die Traumdeutung, is by no means a
telicitous rendering of what the German title conveys. The
two nouns in the English title have exact counterparts in
German. "Dream" and Traum are equivalent. "Interpreta-
tion" is a German word as well as an English one, and if it
had been the word Freud had in mind for his title, he would
have used it; or he could have chosen a similar German
word, such as Erkliirung (explanation). He preferred to use
instead a word that has quite different meanings and con-
notations than "interpretation" has in either German or
English.
The authoritative Duden, which does for the German
language what the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) does
for English, explains that Deutung means an "attempt to
grasp the deeper sense or the significance of something"
(Versuch den tieferen Sinn, die Bedeutung von etwas zu er-
fassen). This, then, is what Freud wished to convey by his
title: that what he was presenting was an attempt at graspi1lg
for a deeper sense. The first sentence of his introduction to

the book emphasizes this idea; it begins: "In here attempting
a presentation of the meaning of dreams ..." (or, since the
German word he uses is again Traumdeutung, one might
replace "meaning" with "deeper meaning"). Deutung is
derived from the verbs deuten and bedeuten, and the conno-
tations of these verbs adhere to the noun. Duden defines
deuten as "to point with a finger at something," and its
definition of bedeuten includes: "what is its sense, what does
it mean, what is behind it, what is at the bottom of it"
(welcben Sinn bat das, was meint es, was steckt dabinter).
What Freud intended to indicate with the title Die
Traumdeutung was that he would attempt to point out the
many-layered nature of dreams, to elucidate their meaning
by showing what lay behind them. He did not mean to
promise that he would be able to "make clear and explicit"
(the OED's definition of "interpret") the meaning of
dreams, because that would be impossible. Every dream
has many elements. First, there is the manifest dream, the
dream remembered. Behind it is the latent dream content,
of which the manifest dream is only a remnant or a distor-
tion. There is also the day residue, some recent experience
that is woven into the dream, or that partly causes it. And
there are wishes that find expression in the dream, as well
as many other unconscious elements. Freud was indeed
trying to show what lies behind the dream as it is remem-
bered on awakening, and this search for what is at the bot-
tom of the dream (was steckt dabinter) is implied in the
word Deutung.
The difference between the English word "interpreta-
tion" and the German word Deutung is best suggested by
another German compound word: Sterndeutung (astrol-
ogy). Both Sterndeutung and Traumdeutung signify most
ancient efforts to make sense of something-in the first case,
the movements of the stars; in the second, dreams. There are
parallels between these ancient efforts to discover meaning
and the entirely new efforts of Freud. Astrologers try to
predict the future from events long past, since the move-
ments of the stars and constellations on which they base
their predictions occurred light-years ago. Soothsayers and
dream interpreters also rely on supposed ancient wisdom,
such as that handed down from the Egyptians (probably
chosen because of Joseph's predictions based on Pharaoh's
dreams). Freud shared with these practitioners the convic-
tion that guided his pioneering discoveries: that dreams have
important meaning and that we can discover this meaning.
He agreed that to a large extent dreams can be understood
only as the consequence of past events-not events in the
heavens, however, but those of individual human lives. In a
way, he turned the beliefs of astrologers and dream inter-
preters upside down: he showed that through the interpreta-
tion of dreams we cannot predict the future but can indeed
discover otherwise unknown events of the past.
By giving his book a title that he knew must evoke
associations to the ancient but still popular superstitious and
fantastic attempts to make sense of incomprehensible
phenomena, Freud indicated that he did not shun efforts to
make sense out of what all serious-minded, scientifically
inclined people were convinced was utter nonsense. His
title suggests, too, that when analyzing dreams one cannot
expect to arrive at anything close to the definitive certainty
required in the natural sciences. In his paper "A Difficulty
FREUD AND MAN" S SOUL
of Psychoanalysis" I (1917), Freud compared his discovery of

psychoanalysis to the work of Copernicus, who, starting as
an astrologer, founded modem astronomy-the discipline
that completely changed our views of the universe and gave
us an understanding of what goes on in the infinite (or
possibly finite, but nevertheless unimaginably vast) outer
space within which all of life unfolds. Freud believed that
the study and understanding of our dreams would open to
our comprehension the previously unrecognized enormous
inner space of the soul.
The Latin motto that precedes the text further warns
that the book deals with a murky world, where one cannot
expect the level of clarity that an "interpretation" would
offer. The motto-which Freud settled on only after much
hesitation and deliberation about the suitability of other quo-
tations-is a line from Virgil's Aeneid: Flectere si nequeo Su-
peros, Acberonta movebo. The significance of this motto is lost
on anyone who is not familiar with Latin and Latin litera-
ture. Even a translation-"If I cannot move heaven, I will
stir up the underworld"-fails to communicate the full
meaning; one needs also to know the context in which the
line occurs. In Virgil's poem, Juno speaks these words in
'While not actually mistranslaring the tide of this paper, the translator added
three entirely superfluous words to it. Freud titled the e.o;say "Ei7lt SclrwitTigkeit dtT
PsycbOlJ7Ialyse," which simply means "a difficulty of psychoanalysis." The diffi-
culty he discusses is the blow psychoanalysis inflicts on our natcissism by showing
that our I is not master of its own house. This injury to our self-love Freud
compares to that which Copernicus inflicted by showing us that the earth is not
the center of the universe, and to that which Darwin inflicted by fotcing us to
recognize how closely we are related to other animals. The tide of this essay is
given in the Standard Edition as "A Difficulty in the Path of Psychoanalysis,"
although nowhere in the paper does Freud speak of a "path" of psychoanalysis that
some difficulty would obstruct.
desperation because she has failed to get help from the gods
and thus must seek it from the infernal regions. Read in this
context, the motto suggests that only when aid from the
powers of light (the conscious mind) is insufficient or un-
available are we justified in calling on the powers of darkness
(the unconscious) for help in gaining our goals (in this case,
an understanding of dreams). This motto is particularly
appropriate because it can also be read to suggest that if the
superior world (our conscious mind) refuses to respond to
the unconscious, then the underworld of the unconscious
will shake up this superior world. Thus, the motto, like the
word Deutung, warns that we shall have to enter a world of
darkness and uncertainty, a world of chaos that defies clear-
cut translation and interpretation.
By inviting us to follow him into the seeming chaos of
the world of darkness, of the unconscious and its irrational-
ity, Freud intended to change our views of man; but this
could be done only if we changed our view of ourselves and
reached an understanding also of the darkest aspects of our
minds. If we did, we would discover that what went on
there could be understood and would, in its own way, make
good sense, teaching us a great deal about ourselves. Freud
tried to correct and enlarge our ideas about our dreams and
to instruct us about their meaning, hoping that familiarity
with the hidden aspects of our souls would permit us a
deeper, more complete understanding of ourselves.
It would be difficult to find an English title as short, con-
cise, and evocative as Die Traumdeutung, a title that would
indicate all this at a glance to the casual reader. But "interpre-
tation," with its implied promise of a clearcut and definite
explanation of dreams, is misleading. It promises too much
and makes things appear much less ambiguous than they are
in reality. Titles such asA Search Jor the Meaning oj Dreams or
An Inquiry into the Meaning oj Dreams, while awkward,
would have been more in line with what Freud wished to
convey. Soon after the appearance of his book on dreams,
Freud had a fantasy that he reported in a letter to his friend
Fliess. This fantasy was that someday a marble tablet would
mark the place where he understood for the first time the
meaning of dreams; it would bear the inscription "Here the
secret of dreams was revealed to Dr. Sigmund Freud on July
24,1895." Thus, Freud could have named his book The Secret
of Dreams. But he did not. He chose instead a title that would
suggest a beginning, and that would give the impression that
his book dealt with the ancient pseudoscience of dream inter-
pretation and would even evoke associations to that other
equally ancient pseudoscience, astrology. The English title
gives the impression that Freud presented a definitive treatise
on dreams; by failing to summon associations to astrology, it
does not suggest the parallel between the discovery of the
true nature of the universe and the discovery of the true inner
world of the soul.
x
Of all the mistranslations of Freud's phraseology, none has
hampered our understanding of his humanistic views more
than the elimination of his references to the soul (die Seele).
71
Freud evokes the image of the soul quite frequently-espe-

cially in crucial passages where he is attempting to provide
a broad view of his system. For instance, in Tbe Interpreta-
tion oj Dreams, where he is discussing the origin of dreams,
he states "that the dream is a result of the activity of our own
soul" ("tlass der Traum ein Ergebnis unserer eigenen Seelen-
tiitigkeit ist "). And in The Qyestion oj Lay Analysis, where
he is conceptualizing the workings of the psyche, distin-
guishing the conscious from the unconscious, and distin-
guishing the functions of the it, the I, and the above-I, he
uses the term "soul" to describe what he regards as the
overarching concept that takes in all the others. It seems
natural to Freud to speak of man's soul. By evoking the
image of the soul and all its associations, Freud is emphasiz-
ing our common humanity. Unfortunately, even in these
crucial passages the translations make us believe that he is
talking about our mind, our intellect. This is particularly
misleading because we often view our intellectual life as set
apart from-and even opposed to-our emotional life, the
life of our fantasies and dreams. The goal of psychoanalysis,
of course, is to integrate the emotional life into the intellec-
tuallife.
In .various places, Freud spoke about "the struct~re of
the soul" and "the organization of the soul" ("die StruktuT
des seeliscben Apparats" and "die seeliscbe Organisation "). In
the translation, these terms are almost always rendered as
"mental apparatus" or "mental organization." Such substi-
tutions are particularly misleading because in German the
words Seele and seeliscb have even more exclusively spiritual
meanings than the word "soul" has in present-day American
usage. The word that the translators substitute for "of the
soul"-"mental"-has an exact German equivalent; namely,

geistig, which means "of the mind," or "of the intellect." If
Freud had meant geistig, he would have written geistig.
I will let a few examples speak for many. In the New
Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, in the chapter enti-
tled "The Analysis of the Psychical Personality," Freud,
speaking of the I, the it, and the above-I, describes them as
"the three provinces of the apparatus of the soul" ("die drei
Provinzen des seelischen Apparats"). In the Standard Edition
the phrase is translated as "the three provinces of the mental
apparatus." Further on in that chapter, Freud remarks on
"die Strukturverhiiltnisse der seelischen Personlichkeit." The
phrase is admittedly difficult to translate; a literal rendering
would require referring to "the personality of the soul."
Probably the best way to convey Freud's meaning would be
something on the order of "the structural relations of the
innermost personality, or souL" The Standard Edition gives
us "the structural relations of the mental personality." In the
first chapter of the New Introductory Lectures, Freud writes
about the conflict that dominates the processes going on in
our souls: "You know . . . that the conflict between two
psychical agencies which we-inaccurately-designate as
the unconscious that is fended off and the conscious alto-
gether dominates the life of our souL" ("Sie wissen ... dass
der Konflikt zweier psychischer Instanzen, die wir-ungenau-
als das unbewusst Verdriingte und das Bewusste bezeichnen,
uberbaupt unser Seelenleben beberrscbt .to). In the Standard Edi-
tion, "dominates the life of our soul" becomes "dominates
our whole mental life." Freud concludes his preface to the
New Introductory Lectures with a remark about "whoever
loves the science of the life of the soul" ("wer die Wissenscbaft
73
'Dom Seelenleben liebt "). He is clearly referring to psychoanal-

ysis, to himself, and to the imaginary listeners he had in
mind when preparing this series of lectures, which were
never intended to be given. This passage could easily be
rendered as "whoever loves psychoanalysis" or "whoever
loves psychology." Instead, it is translated as "whoever cares
for the science of mental life."
Almost invariably, the Standard Edition (like the earlier
English translations) either omits Freud's references to the
soul or translates them as if he spoke only of man's mind.
In the paper "The 'Uncanny' " (1919), Freud's phrase "im
seelischen Unbewussten" ("in the unconscious of the soul")
has been translated as "in the unconscious mind." In the
same sentence, "gewisse Seiten des Seelenlebens" ("certain as-
pects of the life of the soul") has been rendered as "certain
aspects of the mind."
Freud never faltered in his conviction that it was impor-
tant to think in terms of the soul when trying to compre-
hend his system, because no other concept could make
equally clear what he meant; nor can there be any doubt that
he meant the soul, and not the mind, when he wrote
"seeliscb." As early as 1905, in the opening passage of an
article entitled "Psychical Treatment (Treatment of the
Soul)," he wrote:
"Psyche" is a Greek word and its German trans-

lation is "soul." Psychical treatment hence means
"treatment of the soul." One could thus think that
what is meant is: treatment of the morbid phenomena
in the life of the soul. But this is not the meaning of
this term. Psychical treatment wishes to signify,
rather, treatment originating in the soul, treatment-

of psychic or bodily disorders-by measures which
influence above all and immediately the soul of man.
(Psycbe ist ein griecbiscbes Wort und lautet in
deutscber Obersetzung Seele. Psycbiscbe Bebandlung
beisst demnacb Seelenbebandlung. Man konnte also
meinen, dass darunter verstanden 'Wird: Bebandlung der
krankbaften Erscbeinungen des Seelenlebens. Dies ist
aber nicbt die Bedeutung dieses Wortes. Psycbiscbe Be-
;,andlung 'Will vielmebr besagen: Bebandlung von der
Seele aus, Bebandlung-seeliscber oder korperlicber Sto-
rungen-mit Mitteln, 'Welcbe zuniicbst und unmittelbar
aUf das Seeliscbe des Menscben einwirken.)
In the Standard EdItion, the title of the paper is given

as "Psychical (or Mental) Treatment," and the passage is
translated:
"Psyche" is a Greek word which may be trans-

lated "mind." Thus "psychical treatment" means
"mental treatment." The term might accordingly be
supposed to signify "treatment of the pathological
phenomena of mental life." This, however, is not its
• meaning. "Psychical treatment" denotes, rather,
treatment taking its start in the mind, treatment
(whether of mental or physical disorders) by mea-
sures which operate in the first instance and immedi-
ately upon the human mind.
In a footnote, the translators acknowledge that Seele is "a

word which is in fact nearer to the Greek 'psyche' than is
75
the English 'mind.' " By failing to mention that the English

word for Seele is "soul," not "mind," the footnote merely
distorts Freud's emphatic statement even further.
In An Outline of Psychoanalysis, written in 1938 and pub-
lished posthumously in 1940, Freud emphasized that his life's
work had been devoted to understanding as fully as possible
the world of man's soul. He had repeatedly stated that the
I is only one aspect of our psyche, or soul, and separated it
from the two others, the it and the above-I. Perhaps at this
juncture it seemed particularly important to him to make
clear that when he was speaking of what pertains to the I he
meant our conscious mental life, and that when he was
referring to all three institutions, to the mind in its totality,
to our conscious and our unconscious life, he spoke of our
soul. "Psychoanalysis," he wrote, "makes a basic assumption
whose discussion is reserved to philosophical thought but
whose justification lies in its results. We know two kinds of
things about what we call our psyche (the life of the sou\)
[Von dem, was wir unsere Psyche (Seelenleben) ncnnen, is' uns
zweierlei bekannt ]." This passage makes it abundantly clear
that for Freud the psyche and the life of the soul are the same
thing. As usual, the Standard Edition translates the reference
to the soul as if it referred to the mind: "We know two kinds
of things about what we call our psyche (or mental life)."
In an early version of An Outline of Psychoanalysis, under
the title Some Elementary Lessons in Psycho-Analysis, Freud
wrote, "Psychoanalysis is a part of psychology which is
dedicated to the science of the soul" ("Die Psychoanalyse ist
ein Stuck der Seelenkunde der Psychologie"). For Freud, psy-
chology is the large discipline, part of which is the science
of the soul; psychoanalysis is a special division of the latter
discipline. It is hard to think of a statement that could more

strongly assert that psychoanalysis is essentially concerned
with man's soul. In the Standard Edition, the sentence
reads: "Psychoanalysis is a part of the mental science of
psychology. "
There really was no reason-apart from a wish to inter-
pret psychoanalysis as a medical specialty-for this corrup-
tion of Freud's references to the soul. There was no reason
for the English translators to misunderstand these refer-
ences. The first three definitions of the word "soul" given
in The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary express very well
what Freud had in mind. The first definition, "the principle
of life in man," is declared to be obsolete, and is quoted only
for the sake of completeness. The second and third defini-
tions, "the spiritual part of man in contrast to the purely
physical" and "the emotional part of man's nature," are most
pertinent. It is true that in common American usage the
word "soul" has been more or less restricted to the sphere
of religion. This was not the case in Freud's Vienna, and it
is not the case in German-speaking countries today. In Ger-
man the word Seele has retained its full meaning as man's
essence, as that which is most spiritual and worthy in man.
Seele ought to have been translated in this sense.
What Freud considered as forming or pertaining to the
essence of man, man's soul, the translators have relegated
entirely to the I, the thinking and reasoning part of man.
They have disregarded the non thinking it, the irrational
world of the unconscious and of the emotions. Freud uses
Seele and seeliscb rather than geistig because geistig refers
mainly to the rational aspects of the mind, to that of which
77
we are conscious. The idea of the soul, by contrast, defi-

nitely includes much of which we are not consciously
aware. Freud wanted to make clear that psychoanalysis was
concerned not just with man's body and his intellect, as his
medical colleagues were, but-and most of all-with the
dark world of the unconscious which forms such a large part
of the soul of living man-or, to put it in classical terms,
with that unknown netherworld in which, according to
ancient myths, the souls of men dwell.
Nowhere in his writings does Freud give us a precise
definition of the term "soul." I suspect that he chose the
term because of its inexactitude, its emotional resonance. Its
ambiguity speaks for the ambiguity of the psyche itself,
which reflects many different, warring levels of conscious-
ness simultaneously. To have attempted a clinical definition
of such a term-a definition that Freud's English translators
would no doubt have welcomed-would have robbed it of
its value as an expression of Freud's thinking. I should point
out, however, that when Freud speaks of the soul he is
talking not about a religious phenomenon but about a psy-
chological concept; it too is a metaphor. Freud's atheism is
well known-he went out of his way to assert it. There is
nothing supernatural about his idea of the soul, and it has
nothing to do with immortality; if anything endures after us,
it is other people's memories of us--and what we create. By
"soul" or "psyche" Freud means that which is most valuable
in man while he is alive. Freud was a passionate man. For
him, the soul is the seat both of the mind and of the passions,
and we remain largely unconscious of the soul. In important
respects, it is deeply hidden, hardly accessible even to careful
FREUD AND MAN·S. SOUL
investigation. It is intangible, but it nevertheless exercises a

powerful influence on our lives. It is what makes us human;
in fact, it is what is so essentially human about us that
no other term could equally c/lnvey what Freud had in
mind.
XI
Others before me have criticized the English translations of
Freud's writings, but such criti~sm has been very rare and
confined, in most cases, to a few ~hort sentences, as if this
were a topic to avoid. Edoardo Weiss, in his book Principles
oj Psychodynamics (1950), remarked: " ... the body as well as
the mind of the individual is experienced in the 'I,' one may
add that neither is experienced in the 'ego'!" Max Schur
discussed other mistranslations, some of which I quote here,
in Freud: Living and Dying (1972). Lewis J. Brandt devoted
to the subject an entire (though quite short) article, "Some
Notes on English Freudian Terminology,"· and H. Frank
Brull did the same, in "A Reconsideration of Some Transla-
tions of Sigmund Freud";2 Brull is, to my knowledge, the
only person who has taken the translators to task for mis-
rendering Freud's references to man's soul. Ern~st Jones,
'Journal of tilt American Psychoanalytic Association, 1C~61.

•Psychotherapy: Theory, Research and Practice, 12, 1975.
79
Freud's associate and biographer, declared that some of the

tr«I1SIations <1were not only seriously inaccurate" but "un-
worthy of Freud's style and gave a misleading impression of
his personality.") Jones reports that when he remarked to
Freud that it was "a pity" his work was not being presented
to the English-speaking world in "a more worthy form,"
Freud replied, "I'd rather Jtave a good friend than a good
translator. "
'Freud's lack of interest in how he was mistranslated in
English can perhaps be explained by his general animus
toward things American, an animosity that was certainly
fed by the American insistence that psychoanalysis be con-
sidered a medical specialty. Freud expressed his negative
feelings most vividly when he told Ernest Jones, "America
is gigantic, but it is a gigantic mistake." We cannot be sure
why Freud thought so, but-apart from whatever un-
known personal reasons he had for making this remark-
his views must have been influenced by what he regarded
as the American commitment to materialism and techno-
logical accomplishments, which excluded those cultural-
one may say spiritual-values that were most important to
him.
In the chapter of An ·Outline oj Psychoanalysis entitled
"Psychical Qgalities," Freud wrote, "The starting-point for
this investigation is provided by a fact without parallel,
which defies all explanation or description-the fact of con-
sciousness. Nevertheless, if anyone speaks of consciousness,
we know immediately and from our most personal experi-
lin his book FTet Associatio1l$ (New York: Basic Books, 1959).
ence what is meant by it." To this statement he appended

a footnote that neither the text nor the context required:
"One extreme line of thought, such as the doctrine of
behaviorism which originated in America, believes it possi-
ble to construct a psychology which disregards this funda-
mental fact!" Freud was disgusted by a civilization that
could explicitly deny the phenomenon of consciousness. He
was also dismayed by what he recognized as the prevalence
of a shallow optimism in the United States, which stood in
stark contrast to his own tragic and essentially pessimistic
view of life. But if Freud had put into words what he held
most against the United States, he might have said that
America was lacking in soul.
Freud came close to expressing these ideas in Civiliza-
tion and Its Discontents. At one point in this book he warned
that a condition may arise which might be termed "the
psychological misery of the masses" ("das psychologische
Elend der Masse "), and he added, "The present cultural state
of America would give a good opportunity for studying this
feared damage to culture. But I shall avoid the temptation
of entering upon a critique of American culture. I do not
wish to give the impression of wanting to employ American
methods myself." Freud failed to specify what "American
methods" he was so critical of that he would not deign to
employ them. But it is clear that he thought the state of
American culture causes psychological misery.
The English version of this passage provides one of
many examples of mistranslations that considerably weaken
the force of what Freud said. The German word Elend
means "misery" or "wretchedness"; but the Standard Edi-
81
tion renders Freud's phrase as "the psychological poverty of

groups." (The mistranslation of Masse as "groups" occurs
elsewhere, too; it is discussed later.) The German word for
"poverty" is Armut, not Elend. Although extreme poverty
can, to be sure, cause misery or wretchedness, it is by no
means identical with them. The English translation permits
no interpretation other than that Freud had a psychological
depletion in mind, when in fact he was projecting a state of
wretchedness. A word that evokes a strong emotional re-
sponse, as does "misery" or "wretchedness," has been re-
placed with a different word that is likely to be considered
as referring to an objective fact.
This tendency toward understatement is not restricted
to the translation of Freud's psychological works but also
mars that of his correspondence and the image of Freud the
person that may be gained from reading it. For example. in
a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud described how, during his
childhood, he and a playmate had treated his little niece
cruelly. The word grausam (cruelly) is translated as "shock-
ingly." While to treat a little girl cruelly may indeed be
shocking, translating grausam as "shockingly" replaces a
statement that reveals the passion causing the behavior with
a moral judgment on this behavior. The original gives us a
clear sense of the emotion that was involved, and the trans-
lation does not. Another example of this penchant for
understatement, which weakens Freud's meaning beyond
recognition and deprives his statements of their emotional
impact, is found in a passage where Freud speaks about
Vnheil (disaster). In the translation, "disaster" is reduced to
"trouble."
XII
Of all Freud's books, none had such an immediate success as
The Psycbopathology of Everyday Life (1901), and it has re-
tained its popularity. In it, he discusses why we make mis-
takes in talking, in writing, in remembering, in handling
things, and so on. The examples he uses are difficult to trans-
late, and so are his explanations of the possible subconscious
motives for making such mistakes, particularly since the ex-
planations often involve a play on words, which does not
lend itself to translation. Therefore, the translators cannot be
blamed for not doing justice to the subtleties of Freud's ana-
lyses here. Nonetheless, one would expect the translators to
have exercised the greatest care to avoid mistakes insofar as it
was possible to do so. The very topic of the book, one would
think, ought to have alerted them to their own propensity to
mistranslate out of subconscious motives.
The book's title has been correctly render.;.d into En-
glish, with the exception of its first word. If the English title
were correct, the original would have to be Die Psychopa-
thologie des Alltagslebens-a very good German title, con-
cise, straightforward, idiomatic, pungent. But this is not
what Freud called the book; his title is ZUT Psycbopatbologie
des Alltagslebens. The German word ZUT is a frequently used
contraction of zu deT (to the). In context, ZUT is an elliptical
expression of a phrase such as "A contribution to the ..."
or "Reflections on the ..." It is best translated as "on the."
Hence, a correct translation of the title would be On the
Psychopathology oj Everyday Lije-a perfectly good English
title. Perhaps the translators wished to keep the title as sim-
ple, direct, and short as possible, although "The" is hardly
much shorter than "On the." But even if this were their
motive, it could not extend to repeating the same type of
mistranslation in the subtitle, UbeT Vergessen, VeTspTecben,
VeTgTeijen, Aberglaube und [TTtum. The translators did not
change the first word of the subtitle; they simply dropped
it. Their subtitle is "Forgetting, Slips of the Tongue, Bun-
gled Actions, Superstitions and Errors." Freud could have
used abeT (about) rather than ZUT (on) in the main title. By
choosing instead to use both words, he was apparently try-
ing to make doubly sure that the reader would recognize
that the book was only about all these topics, and by no
means an apodictic treatise on the subject.
The form into which this English title and subtitle were
cast claims certainty where Freud preferred to express some
hesitation. It is this hesitation that makes it easier to follow
his expositions, brings his attempts closer to the reader, who
feels that what he is reading is an effort to grapple with
difficult problems. If the reader has doubts, he is not re-
quired to give them up immediately, and this makes what he
is reading more emotionally acceptable. The unqualified
English title and subtitle fail to build such an emotional
bond between author and reader. They make Freud sound
much more definite and assertive than he meant to be. What
Freud tried to convey with his "On" and "About" is what
he stated often, and much more explicitly, in other contexts.
He once remarked in conversation, for example, that it is "a
false assumption that the validity of psychoanalytic findings

and theories are definitely established, while actually they
are still in their beginning, and need a great deal of develop-
ment and repeated verification and confirmation."! Particu-
larly in a book devoted to errors we make not because of a
lack of knowledge or skill, but because of the interference
of unconscious processes, there is need for hesitation and
uncertainty. As Freud understood, it is impossible to know
everything that goes into making the mistake, because the
unconscious itself is too varied and many-layered, too cha-
otic, ambiguous, ill-defined.
In his subtitle Freud mentioned five distinct groups, or
examples, of errors we are apt to make when our uncon-
scious plays tricks on us. The translations of three of them
-"forgetting," "superstitions," and "errors"-are as close
to the original as one could wish for. "Slips of the tongue"
is an acceptable translation of Versprecben, but this English
phrase evokes a feeling that it was the tongue itself that was
responsible for the error. "Lapse" would have been a better
choice. According to the OED, a "lapse" is "a slip of mem-
ory, tongue, or pen; a slight error." Freud himself used
lapsus, the Latin word from which "lapse" is derived, as the
term for some of his examples. Translating Versprecben as
"lapse" would have another advantage: it would evoke asso-
ciation to the word's additional meaning as a falling away
from a higher standard (in our case, from consciousness).
That "a slip of the tongue" is a less than ideal translation
here is also suggested by the frequency with which people
IMartin W. Peck, "A Brief Visit with Freud." PJYCboII7Ialytic ~rtmy, IX,
!1)40.
85
use the expression cea Freudian slip," rather than saying

either "a slip of the tongue" or "a Freudian slip of the
tongue."
It would have been nice if the translators had responded
to the way Freud bound together the main topics discussed
in the book by using words with the same prefix, "ver-"
(meaning "mis-"): Vergessm, Versprecben, Vergreifm. This
usage clearly indicates that in all three cases the same thing
has happened, something has gone awry in the same way or
out of parallel causes. All three are instances of unconscious
processes interfering with what the conscious mind wishes
to achieve.
The closest one can come to the German vergreifen is
probably the English verb "to mishandle," which has ex-
actly the same connotation of abuse that the German word
has. In addition, both the German greifm and the English
"to handle" mean "to grasp in one's hand," and so the two
prefixed words share this important connotation: something
that should have been handled right has instead been han-
dled in a wrong way. In Freud's examples of Vergreifen, he
shows how he mishandled objects for unconscious reasons.
For instance, he tells how he kicked a slipper off his foot in
such a way that it broke a marble statue of Venus, and he
explains that his unconscious purpose was to make a sacrifice
of a valuable object in honor of the recovery of a person he
loved. Far from being bungled or clumsy, this action shows
great dexterity. But it is also a mishandling of an object in
line with both meanings of the word: of handling something
the wrong way (the slipper) and of abusing an object (the
statue). Freud describes how in similar fashion, through a
movement of his hand, he bro~e an Egyptian clay figurine.
He says that his unconscious hope was that by arranging for

some small loss, a big loss might be averted. Thus, "bungled
actions" as a translation of Vergreifen is wrong on many
levels. It is wrong because the action that takes place is by
no means bungled; on the contrary, it is often very clever
in giving physical expression to unconscious thoughts,
needs, or desires. The translation is wrong also because it
gives the impression that an action was intended but clum-
sily executed, when often no action what~oever was in-
tended. The translation not only fails to give the correct
meaning of the word Freud used, but it interferes with the
idea that these actions, though unintended, are very skillful
and goal-directed, and it obstructs the connotatiens of abuse
that are inherent in both Vergreifen and the English word
"mishandling."
Much more important than how the terms used to desig-
nate the various types of Feblleistungen are translated is how
this term itself-the central concept expounded in the book
-is rendered into English. Freud coined Feblleistung to
signify a phenomenon that he had recognized-one that is
'common to the various ways in which our unconscious
rilanages to prevail over our conscious intentions in every-
day occurrences. The term combines two common.
strangely opposite nouns, with which everybody has imme-
diate and significant association. Leistung has the basic
meaning of accomplishment, achievement, performance,
which is qualified by the Febl to indicate an achievement
that somehow failed-was off the mark, in error. What hap-
pens in Feblleistung is simultaneously-albeit on different
levels of consciousness-a real achievement and a howling
mistake. Normally, when we think of a mistake we feel that
something has gone wrong, and when we refer to an accom-
plishment we approve of it. In Fehlleistung, the two re-
sponses become somehow merged: we both approve and
disapprove, admire and disdain. Fehlleistung is much more
than an abstract concept; it's a term that gives German
readers an immediate, intuitive feeling of admiration for the
cleverness and ingenuity of the unconscious processes with-
out the readers' losing sight of the fact that the end result of
those processes is a mistake. For example, when we make an
error in talking we frequently feel that what we said is right,
though we also somehow know it is wrong. When we forget
an appointment, say, we know that forgetting it was an
error, but also feel that somehow we probably wanted to
avoid keeping the appointment. Perhaps the best rendering
of Fehlleistung would be "faulty achievement." In the Stan-
dard Edition, Fehlleistung is translated as "parapraxis."
The word "parapraxis" appears for the first time in the
Standard Edition in the editor's introduction to The Psy-
chopathology of Everyday Life. Strachey writes, "We find the
first mention by Freud of a parapraxis in a letter to Fliess,"
and he footnotes the word "parapraxis" as follows: "In Ger-
man 'Feblleistung,' 'faulty function.' It is a curious fact that
before Freud wrote this book the general concept seems not
to have existed in psychology, and in English a new word
had to be invented to cover it." Why a curious fact? Freud
frequently felt compelled to create new concepts to convey
his ideas. Secondly, Feblleistung was indeed a new word, but
it combined two well-known German words. Finally.
"parapraxis" is not an English word.
Why "parapraxis"? Why a combination of Greek words
to which the reader has no emotional response except an-
noyance at being presented with a basically incomprehensi-

ble word? It seems impossible to say spontaneously, "This
was a parapraxis." An educated German, even if he was not
very conversant with psychoanalysis, might readily say,
"This was a Fehlleistung, " but in all my years in this country
I have never heard an American psychoanalyst use the word
"parapraxis" in a casual conversation. I've heard it used only
as a technical term, and then only rarely-and always by
someone speaking about a patient, not about himself. It is
never used in recounting a personal experience; for that it
is much too alienating a term.
It is very unfortunate that a term such as "parapraxis"
interferes with a true appreciation of what Freud called the
psychopathology of everyday life, because this book is in
many ways his most accessible work and the best introduc-
tion to psychoanalysis. Freud thought so himself; he devoted
the first four chapters of his Introductory Lectures on Psycbo-
analysis to the discussion of Fehlleistungen. Faulty achieve-
ments are important for gaining a basic understanding of
what psychoanalysis is all about because they elucidate types
of behavior with which we are all familiar from our own
experiences. They impress on us that psychoanalysis applies
to us.
XIII
"Parapraxis" is by no means a unique example of a mistrans-
lation of Freud's carefully chosen language into gob-
bledygook English. What American psychoanalysts refer to
as "cathexis" is designated in German by the verb besetzen
and the noun Besetzung. These two words, in the sense in
which Freud used them, simply mean "to occupy" and "oc-
cupation." Freud gave these terms a special meaning within
his system to indicate that something-an idea, a person, an
object-is being or has been invested with a certain amount
of psychic energy, which has then become fixated there.
One of the common uses of Besetzung which made it suitable
for Freud's purpose is in the sense of occupation by the
military; that is, by a strong power or force.
Freud shunned arcane technical terms whenever he
could, not just because using them was bad style but nlso
because the essence of psychoanalysis is to make the un-
known known, to make hidden ideas accessible to common
understanding. A foreign word gives one the impression
that it must refer to some alien matter, outside the realm of
one's normal experience. On reading about cathexis, one
gets the impression that this must be one of those strange
psychological mechanisms that may occur in others, but one
cannot be quite sure, because the word does not permit one
to find in oneself a feeling for what it means. One rightly
thinks that if the word and what it signifies pertained to
oneself, or to things that happen in everybody'S life, then
there would be a word available in the language one nor-

mally uses.
In most cases, there were good words readily available
to say in English what Freud said in German, if only his
translators had been content to use them. One of the defini-
tions both Websters and the OED give for the English verb
"to invest" is "to furnish with power, privilege, or author-
ity," and that is exactly what happens when psychic energy
becomes fixated to something: that something then exercises
power (the energy invested in it) and authority over the rest
of our psychic functioning. The English phrase "to charge
with energy" would perhaps do as well. In a footnote in the
Standard Edition, Strachey writes, "The German word [for
cathexis] is one in ordinary use, and, among many other
senses, might have some such meaning as 'occupation' or
'filling.' Freud, who disliked unnecessary technical terms,
was unhappy when in 1922 the present editor, in the sup-
posed interests of clarity, introduced the invented word
'cathexis' (from the Greek . . . catecbein, to occupy) as a
translation."
It would admittedly be difficult to find a single English
word to express what Freud had in mind with Scbaulust-
a term that combines the German word for lust, or sexual
desire, with that for looking, viewing, or contemplating-
but a phrase on the order of "the sexual pleasure in looking"
would make his meaning clear; or, since "lust" is a near-
equivalent of the German Lust and has the further advan-
tage that it can be used both as a noun and as a verb, it might
be preferable to "sexual pleasure." In either case, the reader
would know immediately what is meant. Since we have all
repeatedly experienced great pleasure in watching some-
91
thing, in taking it in with our eyes, and have occasionally

been ashamed of doing so, or even been afraid to look,
although we wished to see, it would be easy to have both a
direct intellectual and an emotional understanding of
Freud's concept. In any case, the monstrosity contrived by
Freud's translators and perpetuated in the Standard Edition
-"scopophilia"-certainly conveys nothing at all.
Freud's translators did not always rely on strange Greek
words for making it difficult to gain an understanding of
what he had in mind, or for making it seem that psychoanal-
ysis deals with esoteric behavioral phenomena rather than
with everyday events and processes and ordinary human
beings. The translators did this even when they employed
common English expressions. Where Freud used the word
Abwebr it is translated as "defense," despite the fact that
"defense" has an exact German equivalent, Verteidigung.
There are good reasons why Freud chose Abwebr rather
than Verteidigung. When we think or speak of defense, an
external enemy comes immediately to mind-someone or
something that we must defend ourselves against. It does not
occur to us at first that we have to defend ourselves against
ourselves. "Defense" and "defender" are terms commonly
used in courts of law, as are the German words Verteidigung
and Verteidiger; from this usage alone we get the feeling that
it is an external enemy against whom we defend ourselves,
or against whom we are defended by a third person. Abwebr
is a common German word that is best translated as "parry-
ing" or "warding off." James Strachey recognized that "de-
fense" was a questionable translation; in the "Notes on
Some Technical Terms Whose Translation Calls for Com-
ment" which he added to his General Preface to the Stan-
dard Edition, he writes: "I have accepted the established

translation 'defence,' though it gives a more passive impres-
sion than the German. The true sense is given better by 'to
fend off.' "
Websterl first definition of "defense" is "the act or
power of defending," and it says about "defend" that the
word "implies an active effort to repel an actual attack or
invasion." "To fend off" is defined as "to ward off, parry,"
but since etymologically the word "fend" has the same root
as "defend" and "defense," not much seems to be gained
from using it. The verb "parry," by contrast, has a quite
different etymological derivation and is defined as "to ward
off or deflect, to turn aside as by a clever or evasive reply or
remark." This is closest to what Freud had in mind, because
the phenomenon to which he referred consists of clever
psychological measures taken to deflect or ward off uncon-
scious content we wish to evade. Websterl definitions of
"defense" and "defend" do not suggest the possibility of
using these terms to describe inner psychological processes.
There is in fact no defense possible against ourselves, even
though there are in each of us inner processes, feelings,
unconscious thoughts, and so on, which we strongly wish
to protect ourselves against. The translation of Abwebr as
"defense" reflects an effort to view as external, or as a re-
sponse to external events, something that is in truth an
internal process. What is worst about using the word "de-
fense" is that it permits, even encourages, the impression
that inner processes, such as reaction formations or denials,
are something alien-something outside oneself. While one
may think or wish this were so, the task of psychoanalysis
93
is to show that it is not. Psychoanalysis tries to make us see

that what we thought of as something alien that we need to
deny or parry is really a very significant part of ourselves,
and that it is to our advantage to recognize what it is and to
integrate it into our personality.
In Strachey's notes on translations in the General Pref-
ace to the Standard Edition, he does not discuss Verdriin-
gung, a term that is most often translated as "repression."
Freud introduced this concept in his paper "Die Verdran-
gung" (1915), where he declared that "its essence consists
only of the rebuff or a keeping at a distance from the con-
scious"---a statement that suggests how Verdriingung should
have been translated. The important difference between
Verdriingung and "repression" is that the German word
implies an inner urge. Verdriingung is derived from the word
Drang, which is explained in Duden by the example "to give
in to a strong inner motive." A Verdriingung is thus a dis-
placement or dislodgement caused by an inner process. The
German word gives no indication in which direction such
dislodging or pushing away takes place.
These are probably the reasons why Freud preferred
Verdriingung to the exact German equivalent of "repres-
sion," Unterdmckung (literally, "squeezing under"), which
indicates that something has been pushed under something
else, and which does not carry the connotation of referring
to an inner process. Both "repression" and "suppression"
(which is also sometimes used as a translation of Verdriin-
gung) indicate a direction. Outside of psychoanalytic writ-
ings, the words "repression" and "suppression" are used to
describe what somebody does to somebody or something
else, but not to indicate a personal inner process. Webster's

offers the examples "to repress a child" and "to suppress a
book." Where the OED defines "repression" by means of
the example "to hold back a person from action," what is
meant is another person, not oneself. Unterdmckung has
these same meanings and connotations in German. The
translation of Verdriingung as "repression" makes what hap-
pens seem more physical, directed against something out-
side oneself, than Freud had intended. Correct translations
of the noun Verdriingung and the verb verdriingen would
have been "repulsion" and "to repulse." According to the
OED, the meaning of "repulsion" is "the action of forcing
or driving back or away," and "to repulse" means "to drive
or beat back, to repel or ward off, to force back; to repel with
denial; to reject, refuse, shut out"-all actions and motiva-
tions that are implied in the word Freud selected.
Where Freud speaks of something coming spontane-
ously to one's mind, something that happens to occur to one,
the translators use the incorrect term "free association."
This term is incorrect because associations are not "free" but
are always conditioned by or related to something; the adjec-
tive is misleading. Also, using the technical term "free
association" to describe a procedure entails the a priori as-
sumption that two or more seemingly entirely disconnected
events are indeed fairly closely connected. Webster's defini-
tion of the verb "associate"-"to join together, connect"-
makes this amply clear. In the translators' use of "free associ-
ation," what ought to be two separate processes--Ietting
something come spontaneously to one's mind, and examin-
ing how it may be connected to some immediately preced-
95
ing stimulus-are merged into one, and it is predicted what

the result of this investigation will be.
The German word that has been translated as "free asso-
ciation" is Einjall, which means an idea that suddenly hap-
pens to come to one's mind; Einjall refers to something that
is at first impersonal, and conveys the same feeling that is
expressed when one says, "It comes to my mind"-a state-
ment in which one connects "it" with one's it, the uncon-
scious from where this idea suddenly emanates. Association,
on the other hand, is a conscious process, deliberately en-
gaged in. When a person consciously tries to "free-associ-
ate," what he says or does is usually logically connected with
the stimulus. For example, when asked to associate to
"cold," as likely as not what will come to mind arc either
opposites ("hot" or "warm") or typical instances in which
the word "cold" logically applies ("winter" or "icc" or
"freeze"). That is, the response to the stimulus will be intel-
lectually conditioned, since the task of associating is ex-
perienced as a demand made of the person's intellect. But the
invitation to tell whatever chances to come to mind suggests
by its phrasing that the connection between stimulus and
association should be not a logical but a chance one. It is
characteristic of the often very difficult work of psychoanal-
ysis to try to discover the hidden relations that tie a seem-
ingly inappropriate (i.e., nonlogical) response coming from
the unconscious to the stimulus. It then becomes apparent
that the stimulus and what "occurred to me, although it
doesn't make sense," are in fact closely related because of
their emotional connection in the person's life experience.
In "free associations" the person's mind is dominant; in "it
happens to occur to me" the person's heart has a much better

chance to speak.
This is the reason why Freud asked-and why psy-
choanalysts today ask-"What comes to your mind in con-
nection with that?" ("Was fiillt Ihnen dazu ein?"). And the
answer, when put into words, is "It occurs to me ..." which
clearly refers to the it, from where this new and unexpected
idea suddenly and often surprisingly emerges.
XIV
Freud's translators have also used subtler ways of putting a
distance between him and the reader. For instance, in the
Standard Edition, Freud's references to himself sometimes
simply disappear. One of many examples of this type of
mistranslation is found in Freud's paper "Some Psychologi-
cal Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between
the Sexes" (19l5), where he writes about a process "which
I should like to describe as 'denial' " ("den icb als 'Verleug-
nung' bezeichnen mocbte "). This phrase is translated in the
Standard Edition as "which might be described as 'denial.' "
This defective translation impersonally renders a personal
statement, and in such transmutations it is the human being
who is eliminated, not just Freud the person. Yet psycho-
analysis is about nothing except human beings!
The differences between the sexes play an important role
in psychoanalytic theory, as they do in all aspects of our
97
lives. In the essay just mentioned, Freud discusses the conse-

quences of the anatomical differences between the sexes
(u..• Folgen des Gescblecbtsun~erscbieds "), but the translators
speak instead of a distinction. The most common translation
of Unterscbied is "difference," not "distinction." While
translation of Unterscbied as "distinction" is not incorrect, it
does not provide a truly accurate rendering of Freud's
meaning here. Webster's discriminates between "difference"
and "distinction" as follows: "different, applied to things
which are not alike, implies individuality (three different
doctors) or contrast; distinct, as applied to two or more
things, stresses that each has a Hifferent identity and is un-
mistakably separate from the others." If "difference" indeed
stresses contrast and individuality in what is basically like-
ness (as the example of three different doctors implies), then
it is preferable to "distinction" in the context of this essay
and its title.
While deeply wrong in a psychological, and particularly
in a psychoanalytic sense, translations like this one are at
least not blatantly in error on a purely intellectual level. The
same cannot be said, of course, of all the mistranslations.
Some of the translations are so obviously wrong that it is
difficult to understand why they were ever made, and even
more difficult to see why they were not corrected long ago.
These mistranslations do not necessarily alienate the reader
by their strangeness; on the contrary, some of them use very
familiar words and are easily understandable. But by saying
something quite different from what Freud had in mind, and
from what he was talking about in the rest of the article or
book at hand, they baffie the reader.
Freud's book Massenpsycbologie und feb-Analyse ,was
written long before Hitler's rise to power, but the events of

the 1930S and 1940S and similar events since then have made
particularly pertinent Freud's analysis of the psychological
factors that explain the fascination dictators exercise over
their followers. The title of this book has been translated as
Group Psychology and the Analysis oj the Ego, even though
Masse has the same meaning as the English word "mass" and
"group" is equivalent to the German Gruppe. Freud's exam-
ples in the book include armies and members of the church
-that is, very large numbers of people who do not necessar-
ily know eaeh other and who receive their coherence as a
crowd, or mass, only through common acceptance of ideas
and leaders. "Mass" is exactly what Freud had in mind; the
term is defined in Webster's as "a quantity of matter forming
a body of indefihite shape and size, usually of relatively large
size." In the Standard Edition the only explanation we are
given for this erroneous translation is in one of Strachey's
footnotes: " 'Group' is used throughout this translation as
equivalent to the rather more comprehensive German
'Masse.' The author uses the latter word." No justification
is given for considering "group" and "mass" as equivalent
terms--which, of course, according to both common usage
and the dictionary definitions, they are not. Readers who
tum to this book to learn about group psychology will be
sorely disappointed. But since the text makes it quite clear
that Freud is talking about the psychology of crowd behav-
ior and the phenomena which underly the formation of
large masses, the damage may be overcome by the serious
reader.
Matters are much more problematic in respect to Civili-
zation and Its Discontents, Freud's most important treatise
99
on society. Even a close reading of the English translation

of this book does not permit an understanding of some of
its central ideas, because faulty translations of certain main
concepts persist throughout the text. Freud called the book
Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, and a correct translation of his
title would be The Uneasiness Inherent in Culture. The rea-
sons for the mistranslation of this title are incomprehensible.
In German, there is a great distinction between the words
Kultur (culture) and Zivilisation (civilization). Kultur re-
fers to moral value systems, and to intellectual and esthetic
achievements-in short, to what might be called the
humanities. Zivilisation refers to material and technological
accomplishments. When Freud used the word Kultur,
he had in mind those aspects of our world that he cher-
ished most highly; and, as we know, he was highly critical
of many aspects of material and technological civiliza-
tion. There can be no doubt that the difference between
Kultur and Zivilisation was important to Freud. In his
letter to Einstein, published under the title "Why War?,"
he wrote:
Since time immemorial mankind has been undergo-

ing a process of cultural development. (I know, oth-
ers prefer to call it a process of civilization.) To this
process we owe the best that we have become, and
a good part of that from which we suffer. (Seit unvor-
denklichen Zeiten zieht sicb uber die Menscbheit der Pro-
zess der Kulturentwicklung. [Icb weiss, andere beissen
ibn lieber: Zivilisation.] Diesem Prozess verdanken wir
das Beste, was wir geworden sind, und ein gut Teil von
dem, woran wir leiden.)
Unfortunate though the translation of KultuT as "civili-

zation" may be, much more serious are the mistranslations
of Unbehagen (uneasiness) and in (the German preposition
in can be translated as "in" or "within," depending on the
context; in order to render Freud's title more idiomatically,
I have translated in as "inherent in"). The word "and" can
and frequently does connect quite different things. The
words "in" and "within" clearly indicate that the two words
they bind together-and the ideas to which these words
refer-are encapsulated to form some kind of unit, often an
inseparable one. The tide Das Unbehagen in der Kultur im-
plies that a certain discomfort is necessarily or unavoidably
inherent in culture; the title's accepted English translation
in no way conveys this idea. The English title might be
acceptable if Freud had called his book Zivilisation und fbre
Unzufriedenbeiten (a literal translation of the English title)
or even Die Unzufriedenbeit mit der Kultur, since the En-
glish word "civilization" does cover a broader spectrum of
phenomena than the German Zivilisation. As these two
translations of the English title into German suggest, the
word "discontent" has an exact German equivalent, and it
is not Unbehagen, the word Freud used, but Unzufriedenbeit.
Unfortunately, Unbehagen has no exact equivalent in En-
glish; but its meaning is intimated by the fact that Unbebagen
is the opposite of Bebagen, which is easily translated into
English as "comfort" or "ease." (Freud himself suggested
that Unbehagen be translated as either "discomfort" or "mal-
aise," but never as "discontent.") "Uneasiness" seems the
best translation of Unbehagen, because Freud used the word
to designate a feeling. "Discontent" is an unsatisfactory
translation because discontent can be and often is the result
101
of intellectual speculations; one of the definitions of the

word given in the OED is "dissatisfaction of mind."
Here, then, in one short title are three erroneous transla-
tions that could easily have been avoided-a typical example
of the truth of the old adage Traditore, traduttore: translators
are "traitors" to the ideas of the author, because they lead
readers into misconceptions.
In his letter to Einstein, Freud made the important point
that we owe to the development of our culture not only the
very best that we have become but also a good part of that
from which we suffer. To explain why this is so is the
purpose of Freud's book Das Unbebagen in der Kultur. He
shows that this uneasiness, these feelings of malaise, are the
price we must pay for enjoying all the great advantages we
derive from our culture. He elucidates the valid psychologi-
cal reasons why culture cannot be had without this uneasi-
ness, and he makes clear that Unbebagen is the inescapable
concomitant of those sublimations which are necessary for
achieving a cultured existence. In complete denial of this
idea, Freud's translators have made it easy to believe that
civilization and discontent are two separate phenomena.
Readers of the English translation, particularly those casual
readers who judge the book by its title, might think that
Freud was critical of a civilization that brought about dis-
content with life. They might imagine that they could have
a civilization without discontent, mistakenly believing that
psychoanalysis suggests this is possible and even desirable.
Such a notion is childish and narcissistic, completely con-
trary to what Freud had in mind.
Probably among the worst distortions of Freud's
thoughts is the interpretation of narcissism as positive and
normal, the appropriate consequence of a natural selfishness.

It has been observed lately that the present American culture
is essentially narcissistic. Selfishness, concentration on the
self, wishing to have one's way at any cost-aIl narcissistic
traits-are everywhere in evidence. It seems that quite a
number of Americans, in their efforts to attain the good life,
have made themselves their prime love object, advocating
self-assertion over concern for others, looking out for N um-
ber One. This is directly opposed to Freud's conviction that
the good life-or, at least, the best life available to man, the
most enjoyable and most meaningful-consists of being able
truly to love not oneself but others, and of being able to find
meaningful and satisfactory work that will have positive
results also for others. Freud evoked the myth of Narcissus
to help us understand that egocentricity is undesirable.
Without a clear understanding of what this myth implies-
that Narcissus' infatuation with himself causes him to de-
stroy himself-one fails to understand why Freud applied
the term "narcissistic" to the most primitive stage of human
development, the stage in which the utterly helpless infant
compensates for his helplessness with a megalomanic self-
centeredness. Freud did so to warn us against narcissism, to
warn us of the destructive consequences of remaining
fixated on a caring only for oneself. He knew that caring
only for oneself is self-defeating, that it alienates one from
others and from the real world, and, eventually, from one-
self, too. Narcissus, who looked only at his own reflection,
lost touch with humanity, even his own. According to psy-
choanalytic theory, amply supported by the findings of its
practice, loving oneself too much results in emotional starva-
tion. What the myth symbolically represents as Narcissus
10 3
drowning in his own image is in actuality the emotional

deadness of the narcissistic person. Narcissism leads to a
shallow, meaningless life, devoid of dose, reciprocal, mutu-
ally satisfying and enriching relations with others, which
represent the best life has to offer.
xv
St. Jerome remarked about some translations of the Bible
that they are not versions but, rather, perversions of the
original. The same could be said of the way many psy-
choanalytic concepts have been translated into English. Par-
ticularly regrettable is the translation of Trieb as "instinct,"
because the concept it denotes has such an important role in
the Freudian system. This is one of the few translations
about which James Strachey felt uneasy enough to disl'lIsS
it at some length in his notes for the Standard Hdili()n:
"Trieb. " "Instinct. " My choice of this rendering

has been attacked in some quarters with considerable,
but, I think, mistaken severity. The term almost in-
variably proposed by critics as an alternative is
"drive." There are several objections to this. First, I
should like to remark that "drive," used in this sense,
is not an English word. . .. The critics obviously
choose it because of its superficial resemblance to the
German "Trieb," and I suspect that the majority of
them are in fact influenced by a native or early famil-

iarity with the German language.... [In] my choice
of "instinct" ... the only slight complication is that
in some half-dozen instances Freud himself uses the
German "lnstinkt," always, perhaps, in the sense of
instinct in animals.
This is hardly a "slight complication." Freud used the

German word lnstinkt when it seemed appropriate to him
-to refer to the inborn instincts of animals-and he
shunned it when he was speaking of human beings. Since
Freud made a dear distinction between what he had in mind
when he spoke of instincts and what he had in mind when
he spoke of Triebe, the importance of retaining the distinc-
tion seems obvious. The notion that "drive" is not an En-
glish noun is not very convincing, coming from translators
who have created such terms as "parapraxis" and "scopo-
philia." Its obvious merit can be seen in the fact that in
recent years it has become standard American usage. Ac-
cording to Webster~, "drive" is both a noun and a verb. As
a noun it means, in general, "the power or energy to get
things done; enthusiastic or aggressive vigor"; and in psy-
chology, in particular, "any of the basic biological impulses
or urges, such as self-preservation, hunger, sex, etc."--ex-
actly what Freud meant by Trieb. As a matter of fact, when
we say that we are driven by ambition or fear we are using
a verb form of "drive" to denote inner propulsion by a force
corresponding to Freud's Trieb. It would never occur to us
to refer to "instinct" in such contexts. It can be argued that
"impulse" is a better rendering than "instinct" for Trieb.
Webster's defines "impulse" as "an impelling force; a sudden
lOS
inclination to act, without conscious thought; a motive or

tendency coming from within." It would be difficult to
come closer to Freud's meaning, and, indeed, in French
editions of his works Trieb is translated as pulsion. And
"impulse" has the added advantage of offering the adjective
"impulsive."
In translating the title of Freud's important paper
"Triebe und Triebscbicksale" (1915), the translators have made
two grievous mistakes. Not only have they rendered Triebe
as "instincts" but they have replaced Scbicksale ("fates,"
"destinies") with "vicissitudes." The title is given in the
Standard Edition as "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes."
"Fate" is a word that we readily apply to ourselves and to
other human beings when we speak of what happens to us
during a lifetime. Freud used this word to bring what he was
talking about closer to us and the way we experience life.
We do not apply the term "vicissitude" to ourselves or to
the course of events that shape our lives; it is, as Webster's
declares it to be, a bookish term. It evokes no emotional
reaction. In fact, "vicissitude" is a term that is readily used
to describe nonhuman occurrences; the OED gives the ex-
ample "the vicissitude of tides." It is true that both "fate"
and "destiny" carry the implication of inevitability, which
neither the German Scbicksale nor the English "vicissitudes"
does. And Freud certainly did not mean that there is any
inevitability inherent in the changes our inner drives are
subject to. But if the translators rejected "fate" because of its
implication of immutability, they could have used "change"
or "mutability" instead. They could, for example, have
translated the title as "Drives and Their Mutability."
In this paper, Freud set down his belief that impulses or
drives can be changed in various ways: into their opposites;

directed against the person himself; or suppressed; or sub-
limated. "Instincts" is the wrong word for what Freud had
in mind precisely because instincts are inborn, unconscious,
and basically unalterable. Websterl defines "instinct" as "an
inborn tendency to behave in ways characteristic of a spe.-
cies, an unacquired mode of response to stimuli." The OED
calls "instinct" an "innate propensity in organized beings
(especially in the lower animals), varying with the species,
and manifesting itself in acts which appear to be rational, but
are performed without conscious adaptation of means to
ends." Freud never believed that the most important aspects
of our behavior are determined by our instincts and are
therefore beyond the reach of our influence. (If they were,
psychoanalytic therapy would be an impossibility.) As he
wrote in a famous passage in the New Introductory Lectures,
the purpose of psychoanalysis is "to strengthen the I, to
make it more independent of the above-I, to widen its field
of perception and to extend its organization so that it can
appropriate to itself new portions of the it," and he added,
"Where it was, there should become I." Psychoanalysis at-
tempts to demonstrate that our most basic motives are sub-
ject to conscious recognition and deliberate alteration. If "I"
am driven by fear or ambition or greed, "I" can do some-
thing about it. Men and women, unlike animals, can change
themselves in significant ways.
In no respect has the rendering of Trieb as "instinct"
done more harm to the understanding of psychoanalysis
than in its use in connection with the "death instinct." In-
deed, there would be no point to a psychoanalysis that pos-
ited a death instinct, and for this reason American psycho-
10 7
analysis rightly distances itself from the idea of a death

instinct. But Freud never spoke of a death instinct-only of
a mostly unconscious drive or impulse that provokes us to
aggressive, destructive, and self-destructive actions. Some Qf
us are certainly driven toward death-our own death or
death inflicted on others. Otherwise, how could one explain
suicides that are not due to an incurable sickness or some
similar cause-suicides by affluent American adolescents,
for example? Without the concept of a death drive, some
events of recent history-German history in particular-are
incomprehensible. To reject the idea of the death impulse is
to reduce Freud's dualistic system-according to which in
our soul a passionate struggle raging between two contrary
impulses determines what we feel and do, and which in large
measure explains the difficulties from which we suffer-to
a monistic system capable of supporting only the most plac-
id view of our inner life.
Freud took care to emphasize the conflicts within the
soul, and their consequences for an individual: how he could
live well with himself despite these conflicts----or possibly
because of them, since they also make for the richness of his
.inner life. If we disregard what he referred to, in Civilization
and Its Discontents, as the battle of "the two 'Heavenly Pow-
ers' "-of "eternal Eros" against "his equally eternal oppo-
nent [Thanatos],,-then the crucial problem facing us is no
longer how to manage our inner. conflicts and contradic-
tions (that is, how to get along with ourselves) but merely
how to get along. That problem was of no interest whatever
to Freud. Such simplification and reductionism opened the
door to the interpretation of Freud's system as advocating
"adjusrment"-something that Freud never advocated-
and to a disregard of his pessimistic and tragic view of life

and its replacement by a pragmatic meliorism.
With the mistranslation of Freud's thoughts to make
them fit better into a behavioristic frame of reference-a
frame of reference completely alien to psychoanalysis-it is
understandable that in the English-speaking world his con-
cepts were not only examined in this light but found want-
ing. If behavioristic studies could prove Freud right, his
would no longer be an introspective psychology that tries
to elucidate the darkest recesses of the soul-the forces least
accessible to our observation. Behaviorism concentrates on
what can be seen from the outside, what can be studied
objectively by an uninvolved observer, what can be rep-
licated and assigned numerical values. Psychoanalysis is
concerned with what is unique to a person's life-with his
unique life history, which makes him different from all other
people-and it is an approach diametrically opposed to
behaviorism. All this might have been obvious if Freud's
references to man's soul and the conflicts within it had been
retained in the English translation of his writings. Our ev-
eryday experiences would have made it easy for us to accept
the idea that much of man's behavior is most readily ex-
plained by the assumption that very strong destructive im-
pulses dwell in all of us. Because in translation Freud's
statements about these aggressive impulses seem to show
them as reflections or consequences of a "death instinct," his
critics have found it easy to prove those statements wrong.
As happened so often during his lifetime, he has continued
since his death to be accused and found guilty of doctrines
he never held.
10 9
For Freud, the I was a sphere of tragic conflict. From the

moment we are born until the moment we die, Eros and
Thanatos struggle for dominance in shaping our lives, and
make it difficult for us to be at peace with ourselves for
anything but short periods. Freud's system in its later devel-
opment establishes the concept of an eternal struggle .be-
tween the life and death drives in us and recognizes the need
to help the life drive prevent the death drive from damaging
us. It is this struggle which makes emotional richness possi-
ble; which explains the multifarious nature of a man's life;
which makes alike for depression and elation; which gives
life its deepest meaning.
To imagine, as many Americans do, that psychoanalysis
makes it possible to build a satisfying life on a belief in the
sexual, or life, drive alone is to misunderstand Freud com-
pletely. Just as an exclusive preoccupation with the death
drive would make us morbidly depressed and ineffective, an
exclusive preoccupation with the sexual, or life, drive can
only lead to a shallow, narcissistic existence, because it
evades reality and robs life of what makes every moment of
it uniquely significant-the fact that it might be our last one.
The sexual drive presses for immediate satisfaction; it
neither knows nor cares for the future. Eros and Psyche do.
Being aware of the tragic limits placed on our existence by
our mortality and our destructiveness induces us to wish to
see life continue after us. Awareness of the dark aspects of
life makes us keenly conscious of the need to secure a better
life for those we love, and for those who come after us-not
only our own children but the next generation as a whole.
It was our love for others, and our concern for the future
of those we love, that Freud had in mind when he spoke of

"eternal Eros." The love for others-the working of eternal
Eros-finds its expression in the relations we form with
those who are important to us and in what we do to make
a better life, a better world for them. The goal is not an
impossible utopia, where there will no longer be any uneasi-
ness or discomfort inherent in culture, but a culture that will
ever better justify the price of uneasiness which we pay for
the advantages it confers on us. The good life, in Freud's
view, is one that is full of meaning through the lasting,
sustaining, mutually gratifying relations we are able to es-
tablish with those we love, and through the satisfaction we
derive from knowing that we are engaged in work that helps
us and others to have a better life. A good life denies neither
its real and often painful difficulties nor the dark aspects of
our psyche; rather, it is a life in which our hardships are not
permitted to engulf us in despair, and our dark impulses are
not allowed to draw us into their chaotic and often destruc-
tive orbit.
Through recognizing the true nature of our uncon-
scious, and the role it plays in our psyche, we may achieve
an existence in which Eros, the life drive, maintains its
ascendancy over everything within us that is chaotic, irra-
tional, and destructive-in short, over the consequences of
what Freud called the death drive, to which we are also heir.
A reasonable dominance of our lover our it and above-I-
this was Freud's goal for all of us. Through his work and his
writings, he strove to make a rational and feeling life possi-
ble. It would be to our immense advantage to heed these
lessons he tried to teach us.
In his last great theoretical paper on psychoanalysis.
III
"Analysis Terminable and Interminable" (I937), Freud

wrote, "There can be no question of an antithesis between
an optimistic and a pessimistic theory of life; only the simul-
taneous working together and against each other of both
primordial drives, of Eros and the death drive, can explain
the colorfulness of life, never the one or the other all by
itself." Poets express the same insight in their own language.
Faulkner, in the speech he gave on accepting the Nobel
Prize, said, "The problems of the human heart in conflict
with itself ... alone can make good writing." Not only good
writing, he might have added, but all else that is best in man.
The conflict in our soul between Eros and Thanatos can
bring forth the worst and the very best in our thoughts and
actions. Recognition of the worst possibilities-the destruc-
tion of all mankind-led Freud to his tragic view of life. But
the best possibilities inherent in our soul sustained him even
in deepest adversity, and made his life not just bearable but
worthwhile and, at times, truly satisfying. Freud knew few
periods of complete ease in his life. That he, like all sensitive
human beings, had to suffer from feelings of uneasiness was
something he recognized and accepted as but a small price
to pay for being able to enjoy the advantages of the culture
that is man's highest achievement.
We should not see such malaise as anything unusual;
Goethe said thaI! in seventy-five years he had experienced
barely four weeks of being truly at ease. An inescapable
sadness is part of the life of any reflective person, but it is
only part-by no means all-of living. In the end, Thana-
tos wins, but as long as there is life in us we can keep Eros
victorious over Thanatos. This we must do if we wish to
live well. The prime requirement for this is that we love
well and live so that we are well loved by those who are
most important to us. If we do, then Eros prevails and
Psyche rejoices.
We owe much to those before us and around us who
created our humanity through the elevating insights and
cultural achievements that are our pride, and make life
worth all its pains; and we must recognize, with Freud, what
those creators of our humanity did not deny but accepted
and endured in the realization that only in conflict with itself
can the human heart (as Faulkner said) or the human soul
(as Freud would have said) attain what is best in life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Bruno 8ettelheim was born in Vienna in 1903, received his

doctorate at the University of Vienna, and came to America in
1939. He is Distinguished Professor of Education Emeritus and
Professor Emeritus of both psychology and psychiatry at the
University of Chicago. His previous books include CbiJdrm of
lhe Dream, The Informed Heart, Low Is Not Enougb, If Home for the
Heart, Surowing and 6ther Essays, and, with Karen Zelan, 0"
Learning to Read. In 1977 he won both the National Book Award
and the National Book Critics Circle Award for
The UsesofEn,bantment.
o o . 0 o o o
"VITAL ... an eloquent attempt to reclaim

Freud's reputation in America:'
. THE NEW YORK TIMES
.. Mistranslation, [Bettelheim] finds,

has led students to see a system
intended to cooperate flexibly with
individual need as a set of rigid rules
to be applied by external authority.
Certainly the examples of translation
that he discusses support his
brilliantly argued accusation."
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY
.. Lucid and provocative."

THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW
.. Bruno Bettelheim is one of the half-dozen

greatest living names in psychology."
NEWSDAY
COVER DESIGN BY REG PERRY
o o o o· o o '0

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j

Much ofthe material in this book appeared originally in

Grateful acknowledgment is bereby made to the following

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Manufactured in the United States of :\merica

FREUD, in a letteT to lung

Most of the translations were completed in Freud's life-

plete discussion of the many mistranslations-something

longer undertake. And just as Mary learned on this visit

This is but one relatively minor example of how defec-

I have discussed the problem of the English translations of

suggestions, and most of all for his encouragement, without

to me that the English renditions of Freud's writings dis-

understanding of the soul if the soul is never mentioned.

ysis remained. Psychoanalysis as these students perceived it

most of Freud's allusions fall on deaf ears. Many of the

tery of the German language. I Indeed, Freud modeled his

use. When he could not communicate sufficiently by using

sexuality of psychoanalysis coincides with the Eros of divine

emotion, comprehensively human and unscientific. "Analy-

that a young girl will replace her in the affections of man-

tionally distancing language of the translations, that psy-

revealed the crippling consequences of too much repression,

I often hear that psychoanalysis is very popular in

that they know only some names and slogans, which

Like the father of American psychology, William James,

'Introduction to an article in the Medical Rroit'ID oj Rroit'IDs, 36, '930.

their main constructive purpose and will be progressively

spike thrust through his feet) and sent away to be killed.

we believe, as many of my students did, that the term "Oedi-

rejected him as an infant, and that a child who was not

gives true knowledge and permits understanding of what is

rationality dominates our actions, we can overcome the

'See, among other writings, my own book Symbolic WoulIds.

Had Oedipus's parents not believed in the oracle's pre-

of my students believed it did; Sophocles makes this clear.

of the murdered man and of Jocasta." In contemplating

possible-in terms of the frame of reference within which

nections it uncovers between the widest variety of his ac-

passed a bill declaring illegal any analysis not conducted

·What I have translated as "ministers of souls" is, in the original, Seelsorger_

purveyors of an esoteric or revealed truth. (Incidentally, in

and psychoanalysis, in its concern with the unconscious,

major works to showing how cleverly, concisely, and amus-

physical existence, like a bodily organ; hence its treatment

vidual ideas and values. Nomothetic sciences require verifi-

discover in ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome; the prehis-

Freud wrote as part of a natural science, and to translate his

a natural scientist, and psychoanalysis as a medical specialty,

ideas underwent far-reaching evolutions in this process, and

replaced Fliess as Freud's confidant and most intimate

event had its own unique history, existed within a unique

After a lifelong detour over the natural sciences,

Even before Freud stated so explicitly that it was not the

Analysis of the Ego (1921), wrote, "However much one may

the late 1940s, when some of my friends and colleagues at the

oven or a stove stood for a woman or for the womb, but I

specialty can explain why three of Freud's most important

mention our subconscious memories of the deep emotional

of words. If anything, the German reb is invested with

entirely selfish aspects of ourselves. In a subtle way, this

point that the concept denotes an integral part of the person

by him, and that this institution attained its role of power