Oedipus Warped – A Crack in the Translation-Tradition
This article is Part II of a four-part series on Freud’s Oedipus Complex. Though Part I Getting the ‘Psycho’ Out of Psychoanalysis is found here, the articles can be read separately.
1. The Warped Translation of Freud’s Oedipus Complex
People talk a lot about psychoanalysis. In fact, it has become so ingrained in the culture today that even a twelve-year-old thinks s/he knows what the Oedipus Complex is: ‘You want to sleep with your mother and kill your father!’.
Without stopping here to question the obscenity of such a statement, it may come as a surprise to some that the major works of Freud describing the Oedipus Complex have not been adequately translated, even though many today claim that either modern psychoanalysis has gone beyond Freud or that it is no longer a useful model of human development.
In either case, what is more to the point is that the English speaking student of psychoanalysis today cannot claim to have gone beyond or reject the Oedipus Complex or a tradition whose translation is still lacking. This short Medium publication will serve to situate what is at stake.
In 1922 James Strachey translated Freud’s 1921 Massenpsychologie Und Ich–Analyse¹ with the title of Group Psychology and the Ego².
Despite the phenomenal care put into Strachey’s’ translation of Freud, the 1922 version of Group Psychology and the Ego still poses a difficulty to the reader of English since it does not refer to the significant changes that were made by Freud to the Oedipus Complex in a revision of the original German in Freud’s Gesammelte Werke 1940.
This lapsus by Strachey (see §1.3.) is somewhat surprising since the transformations that Freud’s psychoanalytic theory underwent from 1921 to 1940 were substantial.
To be fair, the first translation of Group Psychology and the Ego was modified again in 1940 in what Strachey calls a “considerably altered version” of his first 1922 English translation. Nevertheless, the final version republished by Norton in Vol. XVIII in the Standard Edition, as we will see, still leaves out a major correction made by Freud in 1940.
I want to show how, far from being a mere linguistic problem, both Freud’s 1940 revision of his own text, Massenpsychologie Und Ich–Analyse, and Strachey’s failure to translate it in the English Group Psychology and the Ego situate a logical paradox of the Oedipus Complex that creates an obstacle to the tradition of psychoanalysis today.
What follows is, therefore, not simply the admission of a difficulty in translating a text of Freud and its correction, but the formulation of another project, a project that is not a question of how incorrect translations can influence psychoanalysis, but a different and more structural one: both how an unresolved logical paradox of the Oedipus Complex resists being stated in ordinary language and how the psychoanalytic tradition has been systematically warped by failing to identify this paradox.
Plan of the Article
Before identifying the logical paradox of the Oedipus Complex, we must first situate the linguistic problem of translating the Oedipus Complex from German to English.
But to situate the translation problem, it is helpful to be familiar with the received Oedipus Complex, the everyday notion of the Oedipus as you are likely to find it in a popular tabloid or a journal of psychoanalysis. Once this descriptive of the everyday Oedipus and translation problem are situated, we will turn to the real problem of the logical paradox.
Our trajectory here is didactic in so far as we take the position of Freud, Bion, and Lacan, among others. that if the Oedipus Complex cannot be rigorously stated then there is nothing on which to base psychoanalysis.
Freud stated as one of the criteria by which a psychoanalyst was to be judged was the degree of the understanding allegiance he paid to the theory of the Oedipus Complex. He thus showed the importance he attached to this theory and time has done nothing to suggest that he erred by overestimation; evidence of the Oedipus Complex is never absent though it can be unobserved.
W. Bion, Transformations, p.50; 1965
1.1 Internal and External Difference
In an oeuvre, it is important to distinguish two plans of production between what is said in what is written — what the author formulates, intends, and wants to write — and what is written in what goes over and beyond what one intends and wants to say.
The oeuvre of Freud has all its importance not simply in what is said in what is written, but saying things that end up contradicting what is said or what he wanted to say, which can become, in fact, the occasion for the critique from others or even Freud himself.
One prophylactic way to try to stabilize this internal difference and contradictions of reading and writing is to reformulate them as external differences and contradictions, i.e., differences and contradictions resolving into conflicts between different schools, approaches, or theories.
Thus, instead of speaking of Freud’s oeuvre as saying something over and beyond what it actually writes — thus, always on the verge of forming an internal contradiction — it becomes expedient to speak of varying psychoanalytic traditions that differ, but somehow still share the same fundamental concepts (the problem of reading and writing being put aside or left as a mere means for communication).
Adopting this notion of an external difference in the development of a variety of psychoanalytic theory-practice, one can then speak of a monument of Freud as a place where all the tourists visit to democratically share their concepts, experiences, theories, approaches, education, etc.
The history of psychoanalysis very well attests to the difficulties of maintaining the tourism of this monument; the fractioning and conflictual psychoanalytic school-theories are witness to the fact that the monument is as much a landmark of war as of peace. Of course, there is the celebrated couch, antiques, and Persian carpets that can always add to the monumental decor.
1.2 De-monumentalizing the Oedipus Complex
Beyond the monuments, I want to present here a discontinuous reading of the oeuvre of Freud where the writing produces its own internal difference-contradiction.
My position here is that the letter is not a concept, it can not be stabilized by sharing ideas in ordinary language; while the only way to get out of the current monumental wars and peace between the different schools-theories, is to get into the problem of writing and reading differently.
Said in the banalest way, I am seeking to produce a reading-writing of Freud that begins with the vicissitudes of the drives and the clinic, not the spiritual institutionalizations and the school.
To begin, therefore, clinically, I will start by de-monumentalizing psychoanalysis at the place where it has erected its greatest monument of the Oedipus Complex.
I want to show that it is never a question of becoming Anti-Oedipus in the sense of Deleuze and Guatari, as if one were critiquing the Oedipus from the outside; on the contrary, analysts today have to take up their own critique to construct the internal difference of Oedipus more consistently and rigorously. In so doing, they will discover — as we will show – this internal difference is nothing other than sexual difference itself.
In alleging — correctly or incorrectly, as will be determined — that the difference of the Freudian oeuvre is internal and the entire development of the Oedipus Complex can be pinpointed by this internal and sexual difference, I will begin oppositely: by describing the monument of the Oedipus Complex as it has been handed down in the external differences between the various conflicting psychoanalytic schools and traditions.
After exhausting these Oedipal Monuments, which are actually variants of the same basic formula — the child loves the parent of the opposite sex and hates the parent of the same sex — I will show how the Oedipal Monument breaks down in the lack of an adequate logical formulation.
1.3 The First Monument of the Oedipus Triangle
Since 1910, Freud had posed that his discovery of the Oedipus Complex stood at the cornerstone of psychoanalysis and that the explication of its structure was crucial to its practice and theory.
In an initial probe, to explain the Oedipus Complex one usually begins with the Masculine version which assumes the Boy identifies with the Father and takes as an object-choice the Mother.
Hence, the monumental Oedipal Triangle:
If this reading of the Oedipus Complex is accepted, then it is habitually stated that the Boy has a rivalry or parricide relation with the Father and a love or incestuous relation with the Mother. This being one special case of the more general formula: the child has a rivalry relation with the parent of the same sex and a love relation with the parent of the different sex.
This brief description of the Oedipus Monument will serve here to provide the background for both the possibility of a whole tradition of post-Freudian readings of the Oedipus Complex and the impossibility of narrating it this way. What I want to show is how the possible narrations of the monumental triangle is warped by a structural impossibility.
If Freud, as much as anyone else, is attentive to these problems, it is more in the sense that the warping of this Oedipal Triangle is practiced rather than formulated. By this, I mean that Freud’s Oedipus never does get written precisely in his oeuvre — as I will show — but is indirectly made present, in a kind of metaphor or symptom covering over a linguistic impossibility and logical paradox.
At least this is what is to be presented: that in spite of the monument of the Oedipus a different project must be discerned, not one that is Anti-Oedipus, but one that is contradicted by its own narration. I show this paradoxical construction opens up in three directions:
1) linguistically: in a revision of Freud and translation lapsus of Strachey
2) epistemologically: in an obstacle of analytic knowledge produced in this lapsus
3) logically: in a paradox of the Oedipus situating the difficulties at a more structural level.
The Original of this article is published on Medium
Part III — Linguistic-Translation Problem: Strachey's Lapsus (to be continued)
Bibliography
[1] S. Freud, Massengpsychologie Und Ich-Analyse; G.W. 13,1940.
[2] S.Freud, Group Psychology and the Ego, Standard Edition, Strachey trans. (1922); Vol.XVIII, Original German 1921.
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