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The Making of a Translator: James Strachey and the Origins of British Psychoanalysis
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.
... The psychiatrist who introduced psychoanalysis into the treatment of battled-fatigued troops during the First World War, W.H.R. Rivers, stood as a Labour candidate in the general election that followed the War. Freud's translator, James Strachey, was known to have revisionist, left-leaning sympathies (Linstrum, 2014). Wilfred Trotter (1908, 1909, an ally of Freud's primary British follower, Ernest Jones, expressed similar positions. ...
Following the work of prominent object relations theorists, such as Fairbairn, Suttie and Winnicott, Gal Gerson explores the correlation between analytical theory and intellectual environment in two ways. He notes the impact that the British object relations school had on both psychology and wider culture, and suggests that the school's outlook involved more than a clinical choice. Gerson first interprets the object relations model as a political theory that completes a certain internal development within liberalism. He later outlines the relationship between the analytical theory and the historical setting in which it formed and took root. By engaging with these questions, Gerson demonstrates the deeper structure and implications of object relation theory for social philosophy. This allows him to answer questions such as: 'What kind of social arrangements do we endorse when we accept object relations theory as a fair description of mind?'; 'What beliefs about power, individuality, and household structure do we take in? What do we give up when doing so?'; and, lastly, 'What does it say about contemporary advanced societies that they have taken in much of the theory's content?' Proposing a novel rethinking of human nature, Individuality and Ideology in British Object Relations Theory provides much-needed insight into how this school of psychoanalytic theory has impacted contemporary social and political life.
The vocabulary of anglophone psychology largely developed during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The creators of this vocabulary include such well-known names as William James, Joan Riviere, E. L. Thorndike, and James Strachey. Along with others, they invented many new words and word meanings for psychology. The more a psychologist responded to the need for new vocabulary the more likely were they to be mentioned in publications. Moreover, linguistically creative psychologists occurred together in publications to a greater extent than less linguistically creative psychologists, with William James having the most co-occurrences. A network is presented that links each member of a sample of 59 linguistically creative psychologists to the other member of the sample with whom they most frequently co-occur (e.g., E. L. Thorndike co-occurs most frequently with William James). For each pair, we provide brief descriptions of their similarities and/or differences. There is also a cluster of translators who created new English words and word meanings in order to capture the meanings of words in other languages that had no satisfactory equivalents in English. Generally speaking, the more success psychologists have had in filling the lacunae in psychology’s vocabulary, the more they have been recognized by others.
The article deals with the forgotten work of Melitta Schmideberg (1904–83), who was a significant, pioneering female psychoanalyst in the intellectual culture of 1930s and 1940s Britain. If scholars know anything about Schmideberg, it is that she was the troubled daughter of eminent psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. Contributing to the still limited scholarship on this intense period in the development of psychoanalysis in Britain, the article reveals that Schmideberg was a very active early psychologist, an avid public speaker, a founding member of important institutes for the study of crime, and a prolific author on a very wide range of issues that bothered her and others and that were tied to the troubled history of the twentieth century. A Central European Jewish refugee in Britain, she was among the first to psychoanalyse children and criminals. As the focus on women in the scholarship of twentieth-century European intellectual history is hardly sufficient, this article recovers her forgotten work whose significance warrants reclamation from obscurity. It provides the first exploration of her life showing that the issues her experiences raise are central to the history of the time.
The Cambridge Malting House, an experimental school, serves here as a case study for investigating the tensions within 1920s liberal elites between their desire to abandon some Victorian and Edwardian sets of values in favour of more democratic ones, and at the same time their insistence on preserving themselves as an integral part of the English upper class. Susan Isaacs, the manager of the Malting House, provided the parents – some of whom were the most famous scientists and intellectuals of their age – with an opportunity to fulfil their ‘fantasy’ of bringing up children in total freedom. In retrospect, however, she deeply criticized those from their milieu for not fully understanding the real socio-cultural implications of their ideological decision to make independence and freedom the core values in their children’s education. Thus, 1920s progressive education is a paradigmatic case study of the cultural and ideological inner contradictions within liberal thought in the interwar era. The article also shows how psychoanalysis – which attracted many progressive educators – played a crucial role in providing liberals of all sorts with a new language to articulate their political visions, but, at the same time, explored the limits of the liberal discourse as a whole.
Although the compound adjective ‘psychosocial’ was first used by academic psychologists in the 1890s, it was only in the interwar period that psychiatrists, psychologists and social workers began to develop detailed models of the psychosocial domain. These models marked a significant departure from earlier ideas of the relationship between society and human nature. Whereas Freudians and Darwinians had described an antagonistic relationship between biological instincts and social forces, interwar authors insisted that individual personality was made possible through collective organization. This argument was advanced by dissenting psychoanalysts such as Ian Suttie and Karen Horney; biologists including Julian Huxley and Hans Selye; philosophers (e.g. Olaf Stapledon), anthropologists (e.g. Margaret Mead) and physicians (e.g John Ryle and James Halliday).
This introduction and the essays that follow sketch out the emergence of the psycho-social by examining the methods, tools and concepts through which it was articulated. New statistical technologies and physiological theories allowed individual pathology to be read as an index of broader social problems and placed medical expertise at the centre of new political programmes. In these arguments the intangible structure of social relationships was made visible and provided a template for the development of healthy and effective forms of social organization. By examining the range of techniques deployed in the construction of the psychosocial (from surveys of civilian neurosis, techniques of family observation through to animal models of psychotic breakdown) a critical genealogy of the biopolitical basis of modern society is developed.
Emotions maintain an ambivalent position in the economy of science. In contemporary debates they are variously seen as hardwired biological responses, cultural artifacts, or uneasy mixtures of the two. At the same time, there is a tension between the approaches to emotion developed in modern psychotherapies and in the history of science. While historians see the successful ascription of affective states to individuals and populations as a social and technical achievement, the psychodynamic practitioner treats these enduring associations as pathological accidents that need to be overcome. This short essay uses the career of the Glaswegian public health investigator James L. Halliday to examine how debates over the ontological status of the emotions and their durability allow them to travel between individual identity and political economy, making possible new kinds of psychological intervention.
Viewing the reception of psychoanalysis in Britain from Cambridge, the paper examines the intertwining histories of the post-War British Psychological Society and the founding of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, following the initiatives of the two principal psychological entrepreneurs of the era, Charles Myers and Ernest Jones, Reforms in Cambridge in which psychoanalysis played a significant part are analysed, including the foundation of a Clinic for Nervous Diseases and the establishment of a separate Department of Experimental Psychology. The career of J. T. MacCurdy, Jones's student and Lecturer in Psychopathology at Cambridge, is discussed.
Celebrated anthropologist Margaret Mead, who studied sex in Samoa and child-rearing in New Guinea in the 1920s and 1930s, was determined to show that anthropology could tackle the psychology of the most complex, modern societies in ways useful for waging the Second World War. This book follows Mead and her closest collaborators—her lover and mentor Ruth Benedict, her third husband Gregory Bateson, and her prospective fourth husband Geoffrey Gorer—through their triumphant climax, when she became the cultural ambassador from America to Britain in 1943, to her downfall in the Cold War. Part intellectual biography, part cultural history, and part history of the human sciences, it is a reminder that the Second World War and the Cold War were a clash of cultures, not just ideologies, and asks how far intellectuals should involve themselves in politics, at a time when Mead's example is cited for and against experts' involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.
This is a study of how the labouring poor of nineteenth-century industrial England saw the social order of which they were a part. It attacks orthodoxies and sets up new questions by attending to a wide range of contemporary experience, from politics and work to language and art.
This book provides the first history of how psychological thinking developed as a feature of life in 20th-century Britain. It ranges from the start of the century to the 1970s, covering academic and professional psychology, but devoting particular attention to popularization. It offers case studies of the emergence of a discipline and of psychology in relation to self help, the 'new age', education, economic life, medicine and psychiatry, the Second World War, and the 'permissive society'. Questioning previous emphasis on psychology as a tool of governance, it highlights its role in enabling the imagination of not just better selves but a better society. It argues that the appeal of psychological thinking has been underestimated in the British context, partly because its character has been misconstrued. Psychology found a role because rather than shattering values, it offered new life. The book considers the extent to which such an ethical and social psychological subjectivity survived the challenges of an industrial civilization; a crisis in confidence regarding human nature wrought by war and political extremism; and finally the emergence of a permissive society. It concludes that many assumptions about the route to psychological modernity - centred on the rise of psychoanalysis, individualism, and interiority, and focusing on the liberation of emotion, talk, relationships, and sex - need substantial revision, or at least setting alongside a rather different path when it comes to the Britain of 1900-70.
Although the Blitz has come to symbolize the experience of civilians under attack, Germany first launched air raids on Britain at the end of 1914 and continued them during the First World War. With the advent of air warfare, civilians far removed from traditional battle zones became a direct target of war rather than a group shielded from its impact. This is a study of how British civilians experienced and came to terms with aerial warfare during the First and Second World Wars. Memories of the World War I bombings shaped British responses to the various real and imagined war threats of the 1920s and 1930s, including the bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War and, ultimately, the Blitz itself. The processes by which different constituent bodies of the British nation responded to arrival of air power reveal the particular role that gender played in defining civilian participation in modern war.
This book explores an illness that figures in nearly every volume of Victorian autobiography, memoirs, diaries, letters, and more than a few novels. Variously described as shattered nerves, nervous collapse, neurasthenia, or nervous breakdown, the illness was the focus of extensive medical discussion during the Victorian and Edwardian decades. Few doctors could decide whether the nervous breakdown was a physiological disorder, to be cured by medication, or a moral weakness for which the patient needed psychiatric care. The book uses the letters, diaries, and autobiographies of men and women who suffered breakdowns, examines medical archives, published scientific sources, and contemporary fiction, in which the "nervous type" was so familiar as to border on caricature. The book places a puzzling medical problem in its full social, cultural, and intellectual context.
The War Inside is a groundbreaking history of the contribution of British psychoanalysis to the making of social democracy, childhood, and the family during World War II and the postwar reconstruction. Psychoanalysts informed understandings not only of individuals, but also of broader political questions. By asserting a link between a real 'war outside' and an emotional 'war inside', psychoanalysts contributed to an increased state responsibility for citizens' mental health. They made understanding children and the mother-child relationship key to the successful creation of a democratic citizenry. Using rich archival sources, the book revises the common view of psychoanalysis as an elite discipline by taking it out of the clinic and into the war nursery, the juvenile court, the state welfare committee, and the children's hospital. it traces the work of the second generation of psychoanalysts after Freud in response to total war and explores its broad postwar effects on British society.
This book traces the history of translation from the 17th century to the present day. It shows how fluency prevailed over other translation strategies to shape the canon of foreign literatures in English, and investigates the cultural consequences of the domestic values which were simultaneously inscribed and masked in foreign texts during this period. The book locates alternative translation theories and practices in British, American and European cultures which aim to communicate linguistic and cultural differences instead of removing them. It explains the way in which translation can be studied as a locus of difference and is suitable for students of translation at all levels.
Based upon a survey of ninety general interest, religious and educational periodicals, this paper argues that the popularization of Freud by the British lay press began as early as 1912, so that by 1919 a large quantity of material about psychoanalysis had been written by and for the educated lay public. The expositors who wrote this early material were more receptive to Freud than was the majority of the medicopsychological community, which was largely hostile. Indeed, these expositors were selectively favourable to him: while strongly disapproving of his sexual theories, they were attracted to his theory of the unconscious, although often denying its ubiquitous, deterministic influence, and they were fully convinced of its usefulness in attaining self-knowledge During World War I they also began explaining and championing the benefits of psychoanalytic therapy. Meanwhile, from 1916 onwards, Jung‘s British disciples began promoting his views in the press, arguing that his more optimistic and less sexually oriented conception of the unconscious was preferable to that of Freud. Simultaneously, certain doctors, having been convinced by their treatment of soldiers suffering from shell-shock during the war that some aspects of Freud’s theory were helpful in explaining it, began promoting to the lay public an eclectic depth psychology that embraced some aspects of his theory of the unconscious while rejecting others, especially his emphasis on sexuality in the aetiology of nervous disorders. The compatibility of these eclectic and Jungian views with the selectively favourable exposition of psychoanalysis already being promoted in the press, facilitated the emergence of an eclectic, diluted interpretation of Freudianism that was quite popular with the lay public, including the educational and religious communities, where some applied certain psychoanalytic concepts to these disciplines, while usually rejecting its theory of sexuality
The lecture sketches a previously unacknowledged source of intense interest in psychoanalysis in Cambridge in the 1920s, amongst non-medical scientists, some but not all of whom were loosely associated with Bloomsbury. Amongst them were Lionel Penrose (later founder of human genetics) and Frank Ramsey (mathematician and philosopher), whose pilgrimages to Vienna are followed. The lecture reflects on the implications of this episode for the place of psychoanalysis in the university, both then and now.
Richard Titmuss's classic study of social policy during the Second World War, Problems of Social Policy, published in 1950, has exercised an enormous influence on historical accounts of the period. However, recently his interpretation
has fallen out of favour with revisionist historians who have argued that he exaggerated the extent to which the artifical
conditions of war provided a permanent basis for the creation of the welfare state in the postwar period, and the degree to
which evacuation changed official attitudes to poverty. This article examines to what extent the evacuation of September 1939
led to a reassessment of the earlier achievements of the School Medical Service, and how far it illustrated opinion on the
reform of welfare services. After briefly tracing planning and the arrival of the evacuees in the reception areas, it considers
what the evacuation revealed about the School Medical service and the wider problems of child health in four areas head lice
and skin disease, footwear and clothing, nutrition, and child psychology. It concludes that while there was not unanimity
on the need for reform, the evacuation did lead to a major reassessment of the effectiveness of health services for schoolchildren
and to significant policy changes.
James Strachey stands between his reader and Freud precisely because he translated and organized Freud's life work. Therefore we need to know what Strachey took for granted and how he made his choices in order to begin to disentangle Strachey's views from Freud's. Freud had no fear of sounding disorderly when describing what he could not see and did not understand. In fact, he was trying to reveal the faults in his own ideas by putting them as clearly as he could. Freud also began to develop intricate and nonspatial conceptions, but even these more abstract ways of thinking about unconscious activity are usually laid out in plain German. In his translation 'A Child is Being Beaten' Strachey always chose simple clarity. Because he believed that Freud was describing facts and forces which accounted for them, Strachey usually chose the most authoritative tone or quantitative term. This was a serious mistake. Strachey shifted Freud's focused questions and flexible approximations into artificial words which have the ring of set explanations. I have shown that much of what Freud wrote about ideas which are now called mental representation, drive and instinct, mental object relationships, developmental differentiation, ego-id-superego, regression, repression and cathexis is missing in Strachey's wording. By condensing some of Freud's descriptions of his own ideas, Strachey composed a premature technical language which isolated Freud's work from the science of his time, as well as ours, and may have hindered the development of psychoanalytic theory.
An attempt is made here to organise a body of facts available in the published literature concerning who, when and why Freud and his ideas were first noticed during the early years of psychoanalysis. Specific citations and references mentioning Freud reveal a surprisingly wide range of different kinds of cultural interest. In fact, we can identify seven different cultural locations which adopted some element of the ideas of Freud for specific reasons: (i) the interest in the theory of hysteria, from the Society for Psychical Research, commencing in 1893; (ii) the interest in the psychoanalytic theory of sexuality, from Havelock Ellis, from about 1895, in support of radical attitudes towards sexual freedom; (iii) as part of the reaction against the pessimistic attitude to treatment in British psychiatry, from around 1905 onwards; (iv) the endeavour of W. H. R. Rivers and others to create an empirical science of psychology embracing scientific psychoanalysis, around 1910-15; (v) the application of psychoanalysis to the psychological novel by writers and also to understanding the creative process, using Freud's theory of symbols, around 1913; (vi) the attraction of some progressive educationalists to Freud's outline of child development, from 1913; and (vii) the struggle of philosophers, including Bertrand Russell, to comprehend the implications of the psychoanalytic view of the unconscious. It is claimed that the multivalent quality of Freud's ideas contributed to the success of psychoanalysis over the suggestive therapies, and in the conflicts with dissenters within the psychoanalytic movement.
In 1972 Deleuze and Guattari wrote in Anti-Oedipus that ‘the history of the [psychoanalytic] movement has never even been sketched out’. 1 Of course, a considerable amount of work has been done since then, but their observation remains largely true of the very early days of psychoanalytic therapy in Britain. Histories of psychoanalysis usually rely on Ernest Jones’s own account of his pioneering work in establishing the London Psycho-Analytical Society in 1913. 2 My aim in this article is to explore the evolution of psychoanalytic therapy in Britain in the years immediately before and during the First World War. Specifically, I shall be looking at an institution that developed alongside the London Psycho-Analytical Society in those heady and controversial early days: the Medico-Psychological Clinic, also known as the Brunswick Square Clinic, which was open between 1913 and 1922, and developed the first psychoanalytic training programme in Britain, as well as offering psychoanalysis and other forms of therapy to a range of patients, including shell-shocked soldiers. 3 Nowadays the Clinic is almost forgotten: Ernest Jones, in his zeal to establish his own primacy as father of the British movement, fails to mention it in his published reminiscences, even though some of the leading lights of the British Psycho-Analytical Society under his presidency, including James Glover, Sylvia Payne, Ella Freeman Sharpe, Mary Chadwick, Nina Searl, Susan Isaacs, Iseult Grant-Duff and Marjorie Brierley, received their first analysis or training there. One of the results of this suppression has been that we have lost sight of some of the maverick forms in which psychoanalysis originally evolved in Britain. This paper is an effort to recover the experimental verve of the different versions of psychoanalytic therapy circulating in consulting rooms, mental hospitals, and even private apartments before the war, and to explore the role played by the MedicoPsychological Clinic in the establishment of psychoanalytic treatment in Britain. The wide range of personalities and backgrounds that characterized the personnel at the clinic, and the variety of psychotherapeutic treatments available there, were typical of the various and evolving methods of the ‘talking cure’ available in Britain in those early years, amounting to something like an eclectic indigenous style which was gradually repressed and delimited as more and more early practitioners were converted to ‐ or coerced into ‐ a strict Freudianism conceived along continental European lines. In 1914 Freud himself paid tribute to what he saw as the peculiar aptitude of the English character for psychoanalysis, noting that although:
Fire over England: The German Air Raids of World War I
- James Strachey
- Lytton Strachey
James Strachey to Lytton Strachey, 20 August 1914, 31 July 1914, and 18 August 1914, BL Add. MSS 60710. 41 H. G. Castle, Fire over England: The German Air Raids of World War I (London, 1982);
Obituary: Joan Riviere (1883–1962)
- Strachey
A World Wide International Trade Mark of Genuineness? Some Observations on the History of the English Translation of the Work of Sigmund Freud, Focusing Mainly on His Technical Terms
- Steiner
Bloomsbury, Freud, and the Vulgar Passions
- Winslow
Keynes and Freud: Keynes's Account of the ‘Animal Spirits’ of Capitalism
- Winslow
The Gifts of the New Sciences
- Wells
Did Strachey Invent Freud?”
- Wilson