The Making of a Translator: James Strachey and the Origins of British Psychoanalysis

Abstract

Abstract Both critics and defenders of James Strachey's translations of Sigmund Freud have tended to judge their worth by the standard of “accuracy”—in other words, their faithfulness to Freud's theories. This article takes a different approach, tracing Strachey's choices as a translator to his own experiences in Edwardian, wartime, and interwar Britain. Convinced that the ruling elite and the mass public alike were captive to dangerously irrational forces, Strachey saw the science of the unconscious as a vehicle for political and social criticism. As an attempt to mobilize expert knowledge against the status quo, Strachey's translation represents a divergence from two influential paradigms for interpreting the history of psychoanalysis: Carl Schorske's account of the Freudian “retreat from politics” and Michel Foucault's portrait of the “superstructural” state as an extension and ally of the human sciences. Strachey's translation also demonstrates that the political and social ambitions of British psychoanalysis were powerfully formed by the era of the First World War, and not only the Second, which historians have often identified as the crucial moment.

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