Lost in Translation

...Psychoanalysis delivers little more in self-awareness than, say, the germ theory of infectious disease...

...He sees Freud as a major figure in the tradition of Western humanism...

...they are merely an inevitable part of translating anything...

...In sum, despite its specific insights and often fertile suggestions, Freud and Man's Soul is disappointing...

...Besetzung ("investment," "occupation") became "cathexis," for example, and Fehl-/ettfung("faulty achievement")emerg-ed as "parapraxis...

...But the argument that Freud is most fruitfully seen as humanism's friend, rather than its destroyer, will have to be laid out with more rigor and sophistication than Bettelheim deploys...

...The first is that although the author obviously knows there is no neutral, privileged way to transfer meaning intact from one language to another-this is one of the primary theses of his book—he fails to acknowledge that translation is inherently (and not just accidentally or meretriciously) an act of interpretation...

...Nevertheless, significant matters are involved here and Bettelheim does little to engage them in a fresh fashion...

...Still, the connection the author wants to forge between medicalization and the translation of Freud requires more evidence...

...The second point is that, as Paul Ri-coeur has emphasized, Freud's is a "mixed discourse," at times scientific and concerned with natural forces, at times interpretive and bent on discovering meaning...

...Or, barring that, he has to show why American analysts have been so much more adversely affected by these misrepresentations than their British counterparts...

...Such a characterization of the "I" forgets Freud's insistence on the unconscious dimensions of the ego, particularly the defense mechanisms...

...Bettelheim concedes that Anna Freud cleared the Standard Edition...

...All this is terribly complicated and can easily degenerate into scholastic nit-picking...

...With his slim volume Bruno Bettelheim now joins the controversy...

...Bettelheim slights this truth when he states that for Freud "the T refers primarily to the conscious, rational aspects of oneself...

...Unfortunately, Bettelheim's other major line of attack—the rendering of Es, Ich and Uberich as "id," "ego" and "superego" instead of "it," "I" and "higher I"—raises more questions than he is prepared to answer...

...True, the current English versions, each of which is a latinate construct, are unduly mystifying...

...For instance, the reading of Freud associated with Jacques Lacan maintains that psychoanalysis is not a form of humanism, that it undermines the humanist notion of a coherent, unified personality capable of self-knowledge...

...Bettelheim is not probing enough to engage the deeper issues of psychoanalytic theory or translation, and he has not done the research necessary to corroborate his hunches...

...Freud comes across as much more arid and one-sidedly intellectual in English than in German...

...What precisely Freud said on the subject, what vision of selfhood and society he advanced are matters of an intense debate ranging across national, philosophical and disciplinary lines...

...If the translations are marred by a consistently skewed pattern, he reasons, a desire to medicalize the psychoanalytic profession must be at fault...

...Bettelheim makes his best and most interesting case when he sets forth the implications of Freud's use of Seek ("soul") versus the English "mind" or "mental...

...On the issue of responsibility for the pervasive American misinterpretation tion of Freud, Bettelheim's case suffers from the fallacy of affirming the consequent and a lack of hard digging...

...This antihumanist position has not gone uncontested, as the works of Jurgen Habermas and Paul Ricoeur attest...

...Further, there are important connotative differences between das Ich ("the ego") and Ich without the article...

...From this it follows that psychoanalysis should be considered a historical, interpretive undertaking instead of a natural science: Its essential aim is self-discovery, rather than the laying bare of laws about the self...

...He bases his claims to authority, in so far as he makes them, on his personal experience as a native of the city and culture where psychoanalysis was born, and on his being a practitioner in the field in America for nearly 40 years...

...Indeed, his picture of Freud as a humanist presents its own set of difficulties...

...Bet-telheim's Freud comes out sounding too much the reasonable humanist, a sort of modern Socrates in Viennese dress...

...Bettelheim therefore needs to demonstrate that British analysts, who rely on the same texts, have also succumbed to the spell of the medical model...

...Even more to the point, the effort was presided over by James Strachey, who was neither an American nor a doctor...

...Others have also charged, as he rightly does, that psychoanalytic theory often sounds excessively jargonized because relatively straightforward German terms were turned into ponderous neologisms...

...in the context of this book they simply do not suffice...

...Thus his rendition is not the last word either...

...There is no doubt that the medical profession has exerted a tyrannical, generally pernicious hold over American psychiatry...

...He is not the first to note that Freud's distinction between "drive" and "instinct" was not generally carried over into the authorized English edition...

...These impressive credentials would be persuasive in other contexts...

...As things stand now, his charges and suspicions, though plausible, remain only that...

...This reflects our subjectivity, and reminds us that we can never talk of ourselves simply as bodies or simply as psyches...

...Certainly Bettelheim is on target concerning many of the translation errors...

...It is not adequate for Bettelheim to assume precisely what he has to prove—that American analysts have been and still are captive to the baleful attitudes and techniques he attributes to them...

...Through the therapeutic process we become "more fully human" and also more understanding of our "fellow man...

...Freud himself was aware, as Bettelheim observes, that this was a particularly American problem...

...Reviewed by Richard King Author, "A Southern Renaissance," "The Party of Eros" Interest in psychoanalysis as a general theory of human existence has flourished in recent decades...

...Finally, Bettelheim fails to confront other contemporary explorations of Freud...

...But in America at least, says Bettelheim, Freud's ideas have been twisted into a virtual pseudoscience practiced by doctors, not humanists...

...These complications do not arise from incompetence or even conscious bias...

...Yet Freud himself was not entirely clear on what he meant by Ich...

...The result is an alienated and alienating approach that estranges practitioners from their patients and ultimately from themselves...

...He sometimes wrote as though the ego were one of three agencies within the psyche, particularly in his later work, while at other times the ego seemed to refer to the self as a whole...

...Bettelheim blames these disastrous distortions on the mistranslation of Freud's German into English...

...In fact, the bulk of Freud and Man's Soul is taken up with the author's examination of how several crucial concepts in psychoanalytic theory were misconstrued into something foreign to the spirit and intent of Freud himself-how, where humanism once was, scien-tism has come to be...

...Two related points need to be made as well...