"My father says … my father says": The collaboration between Sigmund and Anna Freud, James and Alix Strachey, when translating the Case Histories.

Abstract

This paper tries to study the complexity of the personal and professional relationship between S. and A. Freud and A. and J. Strachey when they were translating Freud's Case Histories, starting with the years they spent in Vienna immediately after the end of the first world war being both in analysis with Freud and were checking the translations with him and his daughter. Those unique meetings according to me influenced even many aspects of Strachey SE later on and have still to be kept in mind even today as far as Mark Solms Revision of the SE is concerned. I also try to show the importance and the final control of the Strachey's translation exerted by E. Jones who had planned the Standard Edition of Freud' work already in 1920 and create a very rigid glossary in order to translate him which the Strachey's had to apply to their translations. I have used published and unpublished letters and notes on the translation to try to prove what I just stated.