Nota: Obsérvese que Strachey y Anna Freud respetan el deseo de Freud de no

publicar los trabajos neurológicos en sus Obras Completas. Llama la atención

psychological en vez de psychoanalytic. Es como si se buscara respetabilidad
opacando la originalidad del descubrimiento alojando el psicoanálisis en la antigua
psicología. Bettelheim opina que Strache medicaliza el texto de Freud.

Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological

Works of Sigmund Freud

This was the title given by James Strachey in 1948, and

adopted by the British Psycho-Analytical Society Memorial
Appeal, to the English translation of all of Freud's
psychoanalytic works. In accordance with Freud's wishes,
the Standard Edition does not include Freud's
prepsychoanalytic work as a neurologist.

The Standard Edition, which consists of twenty-four

volumes published between 1943 and 1974, was prepared
by James Strachey and his wife, Alix, with the collaboration
and supervision of Anna Freud and the help of Alan Tyson.
The twenty-fourth volume of the Standard Edition, which
includes the "General indexes" and the "Addenda and
corrections," was edited and published in 1974 by Angela
Richards, a collaborator of the late James Strachey. In
addition to the English translation, the Standard Edition also
contains "Notes on some technical terms whose translation
calls for comment," edited by Strachey, who made use of
the old Glossary of Psychoanalytical Terms, published in
1924 and edited by Ernest Jones, and of Alix Strachey's New
German-English Psychoanalytical Vocabulary, published in
1943. Furthermore, the Standard Edition has a considerable
editorial apparatus: the introduction to each work of Freud's
establishes its various dates of publication in German,
English, or other languages; the context in which the text
has to be read, in terms of the progression of Freud's work;
the links that can be made with Freud's earlier and later
work; and all the additions or deletions Freud made if a
specific text, such as The Interpretation of Dreams, had
more than one edition in German. In some instances,
Strachey and his coworkers tried to check the various
German editions of each text, and Strachey also added
explanatory and informative notes at the end of each of the
texts that he and his colleagues translated.
 One of the main organizational problems of the
Standard Edition concerned the rights of translation into
English, which Freud had given to his nephew Edward
Bernays and to Abraham Arden Brill in America. For
decades this made Strachey's task of a systematic
translation of Freud's work impossible. For instance, only as
late as 1949 was Strachey able to retranslate The
Interpretation of Dreams.

Ernest Jones first conceived of the project of preparing a

standard edition of Freud's work in English in the early
1920s (Steiner, 1989). Together with Abraham A. Brill, he
had already translated many of Freud's technical terms into
English when he was in America at the beginning of the
twentieth century (Steiner, 1987). He sent James Strachey
and his wife and then Joan Riviere and John Rickman to
Vienna to be analyzed by Freud, with the added intention of
creating a team of translators who could then
systematically translate Freud into English and take over
the leadership of Freud's translations from Abraham Brill.
The result of those first systematic attempts were the first
four volumes of Freud's Collected Papers, which were
translated by the Stracheys, Joan Riviere, and others, often
under the supervision of Jones, and were published in the
1920s and 1930s in London. It is important to remember
this, since there is a clear line of continuity between the
translations done by Jones and his group of translators in
the 1920s and 1930s and the Standard Edition. Strachey
did not make many changes to the Glossary of
Psychoanalytical Terms, published in 1924 for translators
and edited by Ernest Jones, which already contained
translations for the most famous and questionable technical
terms: "ego" for "Ich," "superego" for "Über-Ich," "instinct"
for "Trieb," and so on. To Strachey in particular are
attributed the translations of "cathexis" for "Besetzung" (a
term, incidentally, also accepted by Freud) and "anaclitic"
for "Anlehnung." All four volumes of the Collected Papers
were republished in the Standard Edition, with corrections
and improvements; apart from the papers on
metapsychology, which had been badly translated,
Strachey did not make many alterations to the translations
done in the 1920s.
 The Standard Edition reflects not only the personal
idiosyncrasies of the Stracheys but also Jones's project to
create in English a scientific Freud acceptable to the
medical and scientific psychiatric establishment. Although
Jones and the Stracheys in the 1920s disagreed on many
aspects of how to translate Freud (Meizel, 1986) Jones and
James Strachey consulted each other constantly on
technical and interpretative matters even during the 1950s,
when they were working on the biography of Freud and on
the Standard Edition. The supervision of the translation was
also important, particularly by Anna Freud. Like any other
translation, the Standard Edition bears the marks of the
cultural context in which it was conceived; the complex
political, institutional, and financial pressures that
surrounded this colossal enterprise; and the personalities
and ageing of the translators, James and Alix Strachey.
Among the shortcomings of the Standard Edition were that
Freud's polysemous, elegant, and expressive literary
vocabulary and style were at times excessively stifled and
rendered scientific, and that its editorial apparatus was
inevitably restricted by the information, documents,
personal letters, and notes of Freud's life and work available
at that time. Yet there is no doubt that the Standard Edition
constitutes a unique and irreplaceable instrument for the
study of Freud. Perhaps one of the most amazing
achievements of the Standard Edition is that other
translations and editions of Freud's work depended on the
Standard Edition rather than on the original German texts.

RICCARDO STEINER