Beyond the Pleasure Principle (5 page)

If we read with an open heart and mind, despite whatever socialization we have had, art can – if only for short stretches – remove us from the harsh reductions that Freud eventually took all too much relish in describing. Unable to defeat them grandly enough, being allowed only the provisional victories of therapy, Freud cast his lot with what he took to be the forces of fate, hoping to share its awful power. Shakespeare teaches us that we need not join him in this surrender.

Mark Edmundson, 2003

It is a curious and remarkable fact that Sigmund Freud's ideas have entered and conditioned modern consciousness not in their original German form, but mainly through English translations, most notably those enshrined in the
Standard Edition
, under the general editorship of James Strachey, and the ever jealous guardianship of the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. This circumstance would be enough in itself to justify new English versions even if the
Standard Edition
were flawless, since no translation, however good, can ever render the shapes and shades of an original text in all their subtlety; but in fact the
Standard Edition
is deeply, systematically flawed, making new translations all the more imperative. Take the opening paragraph of the
Narcissism
essay, for instance, which in the
Standard Edition
reads as follows:

The term narcissism is derived from clinical description and was chosen by Paul Näcke in 1899 to denote the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated – who looks at it, that is to say, strokes it and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction through these activities. Developed to this degree, narcissism has the significance of a perversion that has absorbed the whole of the subject's sexual life, and it will consequently exhibit the characteristics which we expect to meet with in the study of all perversions.

If this were handed in by a student as a translation exercise, it would end up covered in red pencil, with everything from light squiggles
to heavy underlinings and multiple exclamation marks, for it is so full of slips and shifts and omissions as to be a travesty of Freud's original. At the less serious end of the spectrum, ‘attitude’ would merit at least a squiggle: Freud's word is
Verhalten
, ‘behaviour’; so, too would ‘developed to this degree’: Freud's
in dieser Ausbildung
simply means ‘in this form’ or, more loosely, ‘in this sense’; the phrase ‘has the significance of’ would also elicit a tut-tut and a squiggle, since the German translates quite simply as ‘means’ or ‘signifies’ (the second sentence would thus more crisply and more correctly begin ‘Narcissism in this form means…’). We can also cavil at ‘absorbed’, as it loses the force of Freud's graphic metaphor
aufgesogen
, which in this context means ‘sucked up’ or ‘swallowed up’; while ‘exhibit[s] the characteristics’ is an unduly loose rendering of words that more strictly mean ‘is subject to the expectations…’ (
unterliegt den Erwartungen
). A more serious distortion lurks in the words ‘a person who treats his own body in the same way in which
the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated
’: what Freud's German unambiguously says is that the narcissist (in Näcke's sense of the term) treats his own body in the same way in which he –
the narcissist himself
– might treat that of any other sexual object.

Whilst none of these infelicities makes much difference on its own, their cumulative effect is to alter the whole tone and thrust of the passage (and we find similar shifts if we take almost any paragraph in Freud's original German and compare it with the translation offered in the
Standard Edition
). They are as nothing, however, by the side of the two quite startling mistranslations that reveal themselves in these few lines. One of them is in fact much worse than a mistranslation – it is a flagrant case of bowdlerization. No one reading the first sentence of the
Standard Edition
could possibly divine that in Freud's original the narcissist is said to stroke and caress and gaze at his own body
mit sexuellem Wohlgefallen
, ‘with sexual pleasure’: this oh-so-explicit phrase is quite simply – excised and thus another bit of Freud's characteristic oomph and colour is obliterated. Much more serious, however, is the garbled title: the wording ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ is a grave misrepresentation of Freud's heading
Zur Einführung des Narzissmus
, which
unarguably refers to the introduction of narcissism, and not to any kind of introduction to narcissism. This may conceivably have been ignorance on the part of the Standard Edition translators (they commonly misunderstand Freud's German) - but it is much more likely to have been a case of deliberate spin: Freud's choice of words clearly reflects the
newness
of his narcissism theory and a concomitant sense that it therefore needs a good deal of explaining; the
Standard Edition
(mis-)title, however, implies that the theory is soundly established, and that the novice reader is about to be introduced to it, rather as a first-year undergraduate might be introduced to macro-economics or human anatomy. The agenda here (and elsewhere) is clear, and not a little pernicious: Freud's writing is to be presented not as a hot and sweaty struggle with intractable and often crazily daring ideas, but as a cut-and-dried corpus of unchallengeable dogma.

This agenda is what also underlies the gravest and most pervasive defect of the
Standard Edition
, and that is its wilfully turgid and often obfuscatory style. Even the very best-educated English-speakers are likely to reach for their dictionary in the face of ‘the
thaumaturgical
power of words’, for example, whereas any German-speaking child of eight or nine would readily understand Freud's own plain-speaking description of the
magical
power of words: ‘die
Zauberkraft
des Wortes’. Freud is often said to be a great prose-writer, but while this is plainly a nonsense if we compare his prose with that of Goethe or Nietzsche or Grass, he certainly writes with unmistakable verve and punch, particularly in the derring-do period when he was boldly carving out his more radical ideas – the period so powerfully reflected in this volume. The
Standard Edition
fed Freud through a kind of voice-synthesizer to make him sound like a droning academic; one of the main aspirations of this present translation is to render not only his meanings, but also the mercurial flavour of his style, so that his sometimes combative, sometimes diffident, sometimes solemn, sometimes mischievous voice can be clearly heard in all its registers.

It has to be admitted, however, that while it is easy enough to criticize other people's translations, it is far from easy to make one's own – especially in the case of Freud, whose particular patterns of
thought and language are sometimes hard even to construe, let alone render into satisfactory English. But the very fact that Freud's ideas have permeated world culture chiefly through the medium of the
Standard Edition
and the English terminology there enshrined, adds a whole extra dimension of difficulty: on page after page the re-translator faces the challenge of whether to retain or reject the old, often dubious, but now universally accepted terms invented by the earlier translators. In some cases the decision was easy: ‘anaclitic’, for instance, is a preposterous neologism founded on plain ignorance of Freud's German (
Anlehnung
), and was rejected with relish and relief; ‘frustration’ was likewise rejected as a startlingly inept misrendering of the important term
Versagung
(‘refusal’ is used instead). It was easy, too, to discard ‘instinct’ and ‘satisfaction’ as translations of Trieb and
Befriedigung
, and to use ‘drive’ and ‘gratification’ in their place. Other terms, however, often provoked months of head-scratching. In the end, ‘(super-) ego’ and ‘id’ – latinisms quite devoid of the earthy punch of Freud's (
Über
-)Ich and Es – were reluctantly retained, for want of any practicable alternatives; so too, with even greater reluctance, was Strachey's opaque and ugly word ‘cathexis’, together with the associated verb ‘cathect’: other translators in the new Penguin Freud Library have opted for plain-English alternatives to these rebarbative inventions, but all such alternatives seemed to me to have misleading connotations. In general, specific terms of Freud's are consistently translated (thus for instance
Abfuhr
is always rendered as ‘release’, in preference to ‘discharge’ as used in the ‘Standard Translation’), but in some cases his vocabulary renders any such laudable consistency impossible. A particularly fascinating instance of this is Freud's word
Instanz
, a metaphor he deploys again and again to describe the various processes of surveillance, admonition, censorship, control to which, in his view, every human psyche is enduringly subject. Borrowing the term from the forbidding realms of the law (where it is a standard term for ‘court’, ‘tribunal’ etc.), Freud applies it to the whole panoply of – literally – forbidding forces that bear upon individuals almost from the moment of their birth, firstly from without in the persons of their parents and, in due course, their teachers and the larger
community, then from within in the form of internalized control mechanisms – chiefly hypostasized by Freud in the ‘pleasure principle’ and, above all, the ‘super-ego’. The sheer frequency of the word
Instanz
turns it into an integrative and (discomfitingly) evocative cypher in Freud's original texts – but this distinctive effect cannot be reproduced in English, which simply has no equivalent word or concept, so that we are forced to use a whole gamut of different makeshift terms, from ‘parental voice’ (
Elterninstanz
) through to ‘entity’, ‘agency’, ‘matrix’, ‘arbiter’ – and numerous others besides. (One wonders whether Freud could ever have arrived at his vision-cum-analysis of the human psyche if he had been born and brought up in, say, France or England, since it so clearly derives – like the poetic visions of Franz Kafka – from a specifically Austro-German matrix of notions and assumptions.)

Various traps and chicanes await the translator of texts from an earlier age. One of these is the lure of anachronisms. In general this particular lure has been resisted throughout the present volume – though it has to be admitted that the alert reader might find a handful of words and idioms that were not yet current in English in the period when Freud wrote the relevant essays (no prizes for their discovery…). Another inveterate problem, rendered all the more acute by the prevailing fashion for political correctness, is that of gendered language. Sharing as he did the premises and predilections of his age, Freud's perspective is of course overwhelmingly phallo-centric. In general, this perspective has been faithfully transferred into English (to do anything else would be to practise a modern form of bowdlerism). Furthermore, it has been applied by extension to those situations where the rules of German grammar required Freud to use the neuter – most conspicuously in references to children, the noun
Kind
in German being neuter (
das Kind
). In such contexts grammatically neuter pronouns and possessive adjectives are assumed to refer to males unless there is specific evidence to the contrary.

Finally, a word on dictionaries. One of the major disadvantages suffered by earlier translators of Freud was that they didn't have at their disposal the plethora of excellent German–English dictionaries
now available. Chief amongst these is the multi-volume set produced in the 1960s and early 1970s under the wonderful editorship of Trevor Jones at Jesus College, Cambridge – though if the assiduous reader spots weaknesses in my translation of German words begin with S through to Z, then they should please direct their brickbats at Oxford University Press, who have signally failed to publish the missing volume(s) ! On the other hand, the OUP certainly deserve the warmest possible plaudits for their
Oxford English Dictionary
: no one could wish for a better resource than this matchless work, and having plundered its riches several times daily for many months, I happily close by offering grateful obeisance to what is surely one of the mightiest achievements of English culture.

‘Narcissism’ originated as a term of clinical description, having been chosen by Paul Näcke in 1899 to define that form of behaviour whereby an individual treats his own body in the same way in which he might treat that of any other sexual object, by looking at it, stroking it and caressing it with sexual pleasure
²
until by these acts he achieves full gratification. In this formulation the term ‘narcissism’ means a perversion that has swallowed up the entire sexual life of the individual, and consequently entails the same expectations that we would bring to the study of any other perversion.

Psychoanalysts were then struck in the course of their observations by the fact that individual elements of narcissistic behaviour are encountered in many people suffering from other disorders, for instance – according to Sadger – in homosexuals, and finally the supposition inescapably presented itself that a form of libido lodgement
³
definable as narcissism may occur on a far larger scale, and may well be able to lay claim to a role in the normal sexual development of human beings.
⁴
The difficulties encountered in the psychoanalytical treatment of neurotics led to the same supposition, for it looked as if just such a narcissistic pattern of behaviour on their part was one of the factors limiting their amenability to influence. One might say that narcissism in this sense is not a perversion, but the libidinal correlative of the egoism of the self-preservation instinct, an element of which is rightly attributed to every living creature.