After Strachey 
Adam Phillips writes about the new translations of Freud
It’s never, in any way whatever, by another person’s excesses that one turns out, in appearance at least, to be overwhelmed. It’s always because their excesses happen to coincide with your own.
The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XVII:
The Other Side of Psychoanalysis
Now that the Freud wars are over it seems a good time for a new translation. This is certainly a good time for psychoanalysis: because it is so widely discredited, because there is no prestige, or glamour, or money in it, only those who are really interested will go into it. And now that Freud’s words are so casually dismissed, a better, more eloquent case needs to be made for the value of his writing. Though likely to be largely ignored – and ferociously contested by the remaining devotees and owners of psychoanalysis – a new translation should be something of a new start for anyone still curious. An opportunity, at its most minimal, to see what’s left of Freud after his writing has been put through the mill of the psychoanalytic institutions and the universities.
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Adam Phillips’s On Kindness, written with Barbara Taylor, is out in January.
Other articles by this contributor:
What You Really Want · Edmund White
Remember me · Bret Easton Ellis
Bored with Sex? · Nasty Turns
No reason for not asking · Empson’s War on God
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