This is Freud as cultivated sleuth, somewhere between Poe's Dupin and Sherlock Holmes . . . Everyday Life is Freud's Proustian meditation on habit and memory, his Jamesian anatomy of secrecy and revelation. Brian Dillon reviews new translations of Sigmund Freud's The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, The Schreber Case and Civilization and Its Discontents.
IN January 1920, Sigmund Freud wrote an aggrieved letter to Ernest Jones. Havelock Ellis had recently written - in a formulation that lurks in the shadows of all subsequent readings of the Freudian corpus - that the
founder of psychoanalysis was not a scientist but a great artist. Freud rejects the compliment: "this is all wrong. I am sure that in a few decades my name will be wiped away and our results will last". As a moment of biographical insight and professional unease, this is shockingly overdetermined, almost too good to be true. Freud, indirect inheritor of Thomas De Quincey's dictum that "there is no such thing as forgetting possible to the human mind", imagines himself forgotten, vanished from a body of work that was already ineradicably "Freudian". What kind of collective neurosis might conceivably have sparked the forgetting of a proper name that looms like no other over 20th-century thought? The new Penguin translations will go some way (if these first three sedulously presented volumes are indicative) towards ensuring that Freud's desire for anonymity comes to nothing.
The translation of Freud's works has always shuttled ambiguously between science and art. The history of Freud in English is as murky and palimpsestic as the subject he sets out to describe, full of obscure efforts at clarity and rigorous attempts to render uncertainty. On one level, these new translations are designed simply to replace James Strachey's magisterial Standard Edition, one of the last century's most impressive projects of scholarly translation and elucidation, now showing its age both stylistically and in Strachey's (laudable) effort to tether Freud's texts to some terminological rigour.
In reality, as the translators admit, things are more complex. Strachey may have striven too hard for uniformity, but the linguistic dilemmas have not gone away. If anything, the problems have multiplied, chief among them how to avoid Strachey's scientism while working at the other end of a century in which the English versions of Freud's terms have become established in both psychoanalytic discourse and ordinary language. As Paul Keegan points out in his introduction to The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, you can't translate Freud's Fehlleistung as "Freudian slip", while Strachey's "parapraxis" does some classical violence to the author's more prosaic (and suggestive) German.
Accordingly, the translators have gone for elasticity and readability over psychoanalytic convention; the result is a reminder of a writer who was not yet a Freudian. If there is a drawback to these new editions (which follow the German texts of the posthumous complete works), it is that while they come freighted with stylishly serious introductions, some scholarly pleasure has been repressed in the stripping of their indexes. Gone too is Strachey's "Index of Parapraxes" from Everyday Life: a minor comic masterpiece, with its laconic entries on "child's head knocked against chandelier" and "handshake combined with unfastening lady's dress".
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life is the book in which Freud is most alive to the slippages of sense and style that undo us all from time to time (some unnamable neurosis has me consistently typing his discipline as "spychoanalysis"). It is a giddy masterpiece of interpretation, an uncanny drama of bungled actions and forgotten words. Nabokov quipped about Freud's "crankish quest for sexual symbols (something like searching for Baconian acrostics in Shakespeare's works)", but you don't have to accept the conclusions to be bowled over by the performance. This is Freud as cultivated sleuth, somewhere between Poe's Dupin and Sherlock Holmes. There is even a moment when Freud (enthusiast for cocaine and Conan Doyle) exclaims - of his ingenious reading of a slip of the tongue - with all the insouciance of Basil Rathbone: "it's not so difficult . . . ".
THE leisured milieu, however, hides more than personal perplexities: this is a book obsessed by encroaching modernity; its "characters" misread advertisements, receive mistyped telegrams and are distracted beyond endurance during the first World War. If his case histories read like novellas, Everyday Life is Freud's Proustian meditation on habit and memory, his Jamesian anatomy of secrecy and revelation.
The Schreber Case, on the other hand, reads like a nightmare amalgam of Mary Shelley and William Burroughs. It recounts the case of Daniel Paul Schreber, whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness describe the extraordinary delusional system conjured by his illness: a world in which his body is flayed and his organs removed, a Swiftian horror show in which he is beset by "little men", only to be reconstituted as a woman and impregnated by God. Freud weaves a sympathetic text around quotations from Schreber, but somewhat flippantly diagnoses a case of repressed homosexuality. Repression also governs Civilization and Its Discontents, in which a darkly pessimistic Freud emerges, decidedly at odds with caricatured notions of the liberation of desire. His final, immortally "Freudian" insight is the horrible intimacy of civilization and barbarism.
Brian Dillon teaches literature at the University of Kent. He is writing a book on culture and melancholy
• The Psychopathology of Everyday Life. By Sigmund Freud, translated by Anthea Bell, introduction by Paul Keegan. Penguin, £8.99 sterling
• The Schreber Case. By Sigmund Freud,translated by Andrew Webber, introduction by Colin MacCabe. Penguin, £6.99 sterling
• Civilization and Its Discontents. By Sigmund Freud, translated by David McLintock, introduction by Leo Bersani. Penguin, £7.99 sterling