Beyond the Pleasure Principle by Sigmund Freud Read Free Book Online

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 ofthought 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’,