The Translator’s Invisibility

Bettelheim suggests some of the determinations that shaped the scientistic translation strategy of the Standard Edition. One important consideration is the intellectual current that has dominated Anglo-American psychology and philosophy since the eighteenth century: “In theory, many topics with which Freud dealt permit both a hermeneutic—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 philosophical tradition” (Bettelheim 1983:44). But there are also the social institutions in which this tradition was entrenched and against which psychoanalysis had to struggle in order to gain acceptance in the post-World War II period. As Bettelheim concisely puts it, “psychological research and teaching in American universities are either behaviorally, cognitively, or physiologically oriented and concentrate almost exclusively on what can be measured or observed from the outside” (ibid.:19). For psychoanalysis this meant that its assimilation in Anglo-American {27} culture entailed a redefinition, in which it “was perceived in the United States as a practice that ought to be the sole prerogative of physicians” (ibid.:33), “a medical specialty” (ibid.:35), and this redefinition was carried out in a variety of social practices, including not only legislation by state assemblies and certification by the psychoanalytic profession, but the scientistic translation of the Standard Edition:

When Freud appears to be either more abstruse or more dogmatic in English translation 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 explanation isn’t mischievousness or carelessness on the translators’ part but a deliberate wish to perceive Freud strictly within the framework of medicine.

(ibid.:32)

The domesticating method at work in the translations of the Standard Edition sought to assimilate Freud’s texts to the dominance of positivism in Anglo-American culture so as to facilitate the institutionalization of psychoanalysis in the medical profession and in academic psychology.