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Freud and Man's Soul
By Bruno Bettelheim
New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.112 pp. $11.95.

In this small volume, Bruno Bettelheim makes public a major complaint he has long held against the English translations of Freud's writings, especially James Strachey's translation in the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Bettelheim tells us that having been born and educated in Germany, be naturally first read the writings of Freud in German. But then upon coming to the United States and becoming director of the University of Chicago's Orthogenic School, he began to understand that reading Freud in English was a vastly different experience. The difference was due to the misleading nature of and downright errors in the English translations which were available to him.

On the whole, these translations have failed to capture the direct emotional intensity and the highly humanistic character of Freud's original writings. They have instead functioned to represent Freud as a mechanist confined by the limitations of the medical model of disease and health.

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Psychoanalysis has to do, Bettelheim reminds us, with the analysis of the psyche or the soul. The soul is not a biological concept but instead refers to the distinctively psychological impact of the past events of our early lives. Bettelheim argues that Freud consciously chose the terms of his system to have powerful and vivid psychological and non-mechanistic nuances. In fact, he largely chose terms from Greek mythology because of their unique capacity to, convey powerful emotional meanings. Freud assumed a sophisticated reading public that had been educated in the German gymnasium. He also assumed that when he characterized his method as the analysis of psyche (soul) that his readers would have some knowledge of the myth of Eros' love for Psyche. They doubtless also would recall that Psyche "had to enter the underworld and retrieve something before she could attain her apotheosis," something not unlike the way Freud had to enter the underworld of his own soul in order to discover psychoanalysis.

The English translations, especially Strachey's, fail to capture these features of psychoanalysis. They fail to represent it as one of the Geisteiswissenschaften (sciences of the spirit) and mistakenly represent it as one of the Naturwissenschaften (sciences of nature). They do not adequately communicate the break with the natural sciences which Bettelheim feels occurred at the time of Freud's termination of his friendship with Fliess.

The last chapters of the book are dedicated to an illustration of the errors of translation that Bettelheim has detected and the alternative renderings that he proposes. For instance, the German word Es should be rendered "it" and not "Id." The word Ich should be "I" and not " ego." Über-Ich should be translated "above I" rather than "superego." Versprechen should be "lapse" and not "slip of the tongue." What is translated "cathexis" with all of its energetic overtones comes from the German verb besetzen and should be translated "to occupy."

Bettelheim cannot resist a final swipe at Strachey, charging him with the desire to introduce emotional distance into psychoanalysis through his translations. All this may be true, and we can express our gratitude to Bettelheim for giving us a succinct summary of points which have been made by Rieff, Ricoeur, and Erikson before him-something which Bettelheim seems strangely unwilling to admit. But regardless of the virtues of the book-and it is a beautifully written book we'll worth the reading-Bettelheim also seems unaware of the massive scholarship to be found in Frank J. Sulloway's Freud: Biologist of the Mind that reveals, in spite of such protestations as Bettelheim's, the indelible influence of evolutionary biology on Freud's theories. Freud's terms and metaphors may not have been as mechanistic and medical as Strachey's translations suggest, but they are certainly more biological (perhaps in a more distinctively evolutionary and Darwinistic way) than Bettelheim allows.

In the end, it may be Paul Ricoeur who in his Freud and Philosophy is nearest to the truth when he argues that Freud's discourse is a "mixed language" blending, sometimes creatively and sometimes

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not so creatively, both biological and intersubjective levels of language. Bettelheim makes Freud more of a humanist than was ever the case either early or late in the career of the founder of psychoanalysis.

Don Browning
University of Chicago
Chicago, Illinois