Reading Sigmund Freud I n 2024 Can Benefit Your Mental Health

What does it mean to read Sigmund Freud in 2024? In certain ways, science and medicine have expanded on his observations and theories and taken them in new directions; in others, contemporary thinkers have explored the psyche in ways Freud might never have imagined. And yet, as psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Mark Solms explains, Sigmund Freud’s writings still have plenty to offer modern readers.

Solms oversaw the development and publication of The Revised Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, a massive project that took nearly 30 years to complete. This edition — all 24 volumes of it — builds on the original English translation of Freud’s writings by James Strachey. But, as Solms explained to InsideHook, the process also involved a kind of literary detective work, venturing back into the archives to address some longstanding questions about Freud’s bibliography.

What does Sigmund Freud have to tell readers in 2024? As Solms explains, there’s plenty we can still learn from him — and plenty of ways in which his writing can help us better understand the world and ourselves.

InsideHook: How did you begin working on this massive project updating Freud’s writings for the modern era?

Mark Solms: The most important thing to say regarding that connection is that it was not my idea. It wasn’t me that thought the Standard Edition needed revising — it was the publishers. And the publishers thought it needed revising because there was a rising tide of criticism of the old standard edition. It was at the end of the 1980s that they made that decision. At that time, I was busy translating Freud’s neuroscientific works into English. That’s what I thought needed doing. And so I was about halfway through that project.

When they made that decision — the Institute of Psychoanalysis and its co-publishers — I was the obvious person to rope into that project because I was already involved in the business of translating Freud into English. And so they slowly wrote to me. Initially they just gave me a few papers to translate, a few works that had not been translated in the original edition, and then gradually I got more and more involved until I was appointed as the editor in 1995.

Once I’d become the editor,I then had to immerse myself in the literature, the criticisms of Strachey’s translations, and I had to take a view on all of these controversies. I do believe that it needed revision, but not necessarily because I agree with each and every criticism of the old translation.

This new edition is described as a revised translation. Was there ever any discussion of whether this should be a completely new translation instead?

I had an entirely open mind on that question once the editing of the Revised Standard Edition became my responsibility. The controversy revolved not so much around the quality of the translation in terms of Strachey’s mastery of English, but rather the choice of technical terms. So, Strachey had translated with ancient Greek and Latin neologisms words which in German are just ordinary descriptive language.

For example, where Freud uses the term das ich, which means “it’s me,” in the English translation it’s the ego, which is very different from the “I.” There’s a term in psychoanalysis — cathexis — where in Strachey’s translation, the German equivalent is “beset zone,” which just means occupation. An occupying force possesses a town or a territory. When you go to the lavatory and you slide that lock, you indicate that it’s occupied. If you went to the loo and you saw that it was “possessed,” you wouldn’t know what the hell that means. So that was the major criticism: it was the use of these ancient Greek and Latin neologisms in place of ordinary descriptive language.

Now, the view that I took on that is that people who criticize Strachey for doing that just don’t understand the conventions of English scientific writing. So, in my primary field — which is neuroscience — there’s a thing in German called the kleines Gehirn, which means the “little brain.” In English, we call it the cerebellum. And in German anatomy there’s the großes Gehirn, which means “big brain,” which in English anatomy, we call the cerebrum.

In English scientific writing, you use words from ancient Greek and Latin, and the value of that is that it’s an international language. Scientists in Germany never bought into that. I blame it on Luther — they didn’t like the Catholic aspects of Latin. In German chemistry, there is a substance called Wasserzeug, which in English, literally translated, means “water stuff.” And in English we call it oxygen. So if I was translating Freud, who was trying to develop a scientific language for describing the mind, then according to the critics of Strachey’s translation, I should be calling Wasserzeug “water stuff.” I would be a laughingstock.

That was why I decided to retain the technical vocabulary, but explain to readers what the controversy is all about and what the pros and cons are because of course something is lost. What I did was, I compared Strachey’s translation to the original German, where there are these controversial points. I provided editorial gloss to make readers aware of what’s at issue. Where Strachey made mistakes, I corrected them. And he did make mistakes in relation to some technical terms, like for example, the German technical term Trieb, which Strachey translated as “instinct,” doesn’t mean instinct. It means “drive.” There’s another German word Instinkt, which means instinct. So, you know, that’s an error. So there I did correct the technical term.

Then I translated 56 works that were overlooked in the old edition. So those were translated from scratch, but using the standard technical vocabulary. And a very big part of the Revised Standard Edition is the editorial apparatus. Freud scholarship has moved on a great deal since the 1950s. So, you know, it’s 70 years out of date. So all the introductions to each and the cross references and the footnotes, which explain all these things, they were seriously in need of updating.

So, just to use the most vivid example, Freud’s famous cases, the “rat man” and the “wolf man” and Dora and all of that. He disguised the cases to protect the confidentiality of the patients. But in the process, we’ve got bowdlerized information about what really happened in these patients’ lives. And that’s not unimportant in terms of understanding the psychological issues that Freud was theorizing about. So it was necessary to update my revised translation of those case studies. If Freud says, “She had a relationship with her cousin,” and it was actually her brother, that’s important information. I’ve provided an updated editorial apparatus explaining all these sorts of things that we’ve learned in the decades since the standard edition.

Given that this project took decades to complete, were there any challenges that came up that you didn’t anticipate in the 1990s due to technological advances and changes in culture?

Well, one of the reasons why it took me such an embarrassingly long time — 29 years, as you alluded to — relates to that. In other words, the editorial policies that I initially intended to follow, five, six, seven, eight years later, I thought, “Oh, shit, that’s not actually going deep enough.” So I had a second run at the thing. And the most extreme example of the kind that we’re now talking about is that when I initially was contracted in 1995, the idea of an electronic edition was a minor thing. And then it became the thing, you know, especially with a 24-volume set. Obviously, the electronic edition is going to be massively important.

Now, the kinds of new jobs that that meant for me were enormous. I mean, I’ll just give you some simple concrete examples. In the print edition, wherever these controversial translation things come up, I put the German in square brackets. And then in the margin, I’d give the keyword so that the reader can then go to the glossary and understand what’s at issue here. Those words are in the margins. Also, because the literature on Freud in English all refers to the old edition, up to now, you have to have cross references to the old edition’s pagination. So I did that in the margin as well.

The problem is, with ebooks, there’s no margins. I had to find a way to deal with that, because it wasn’t an unimportant part of the revision. And then all the additional functionality that you can introduce on an ebook; it’s not just a copy editor’s job. It requires a lot of scholarly thought about what you want, how are you going to design it, and so on. So it was a moving target, and it did slow me down.

Were there parts of Freud’s writings that seemed like they had been overlooked up until now but sort of took on a new relevance to living in the 21st century?

Well, let me answer that in two ways. The first is the scientific way. For example, The Interpretation of Dreams, which is one of Freud’s major works, was published in 1900. In the 1950s, major new discoveries occurred, namely the discovery of REM sleep, and following that, a whole new understanding of what the mechanisms of dreaming are.

So, in order to introduce this work, in order to put it in historical context, you need to make the reader aware of everything that happened after the standard edition, in terms of the development of our understanding of the mechanism of dreams. Then there is a very famous paper of Freud’s called The Project for a Scientific Psychology, which was his attempt at trying to imagine, given what he was observing psychologically, what kind of neurophysiological mechanisms might produce this. Freud wrote in 1895. By the 1950s, when Strachey translated it, we knew it was possible to say something about how we see these things today. But even that was 70 years ago.

There too, it’s ultimately a neuroscientific document, and in order to give it a proper exegesis, you need to bring it up to date in terms of what we have learned about all of these things today. That’s one thing — that it was necessary to bring our appraisal of these works up to speed, in terms of subsequent scientific developments.

But then on the more sort of non-scientific side of things, there were all kinds of interesting things, and I’ll just mention two very broadly. The one is that of Freud’s views on sexual matters, there were things that I came across, which I thought were really important for modern readers to know.

For example, I came across a newspaper article in which Freud was interviewed in the wake of the conviction of a man in Vienna of moral crimes, and what he was found guilty of was homosexual relations with a youngster. But the crime was the fact that it was homosexual, not that it was a youngster. And so Freud was asked to comment on this and he said, “This is not a crime. Homosexuality is not a crime, it’s not even a pathology.” He said, “What this man should have been tried for was having sex with a minor; it doesn’t matter what their gender is.”

A woman in America wrote to Freud and said her son was homosexual, could [Freud] cure him if she sent him across to Europe? And Freud basically said, “You can’t cure homosexuality, it’s not an illness. If you want to send your son to me, I’ll help him to adjust better to who he is, not change who he is. And your task as his mother is likewise, to help him to accept who he is and you to accept who he is. It’s not easy being homosexual in this world.” There were a number of things like this.

Freud wrote about marriage law reform in a report he gave to the Austrian state. I found things which really fleshed out Freud’s views on topics which make him much more progressive and enlightened than we might have given him credit for.

Then there was the second category. There was a book published in the 1960s by William Christian Bullitt, who was the American ambassador to the Soviet Union in the interwar years. While he was in Vienna, he got to know Freud. And in the 1960s, he published this book, allegedly co-authored by Freud, which was a psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson. And everybody knew that Freud disapproved of psychobiographies. He said, “If you’ve never met the person, let alone had them as a patient, how can you psychoanalyze them?” It’s wild.

When this book came out Freud’s followers, including his daughter, disowned it. They said, “This is not Freud. This is not true. He would never have done this. And what is more, the quality of the writing and the quality of the psychological theorizing, it’s just not Freud. Bullitt is pulling a fast one.”

What I’ve included in the Revised Standard Edition is what turned up in Yale University Library. Bullitt was an alumnus of Yale, and his papers were left there. And if you go and plow through them, you find there is the manuscript in Freud’s handwriting of his actual contributions to this psychobiography. He was the co-author, but Bullitt had radically altered what Freud said in many places. It’s very interesting. And incidentally, Wilson was a fundamentalist Christian. So in the part that Freud really did write, but which had been airbrushed out by Bullitt, was a fantastically interesting analysis of Christianity. There’s no more comprehensive treatment of the topic of the psychology of Christianity by Freud than this thing hidden in the bowels of the Yale University Library.

There are many interesting things like that. As I said, I’m just giving you headlines, but the new works. Oh, speaking of America, since I’m mentioning Yale University and you’re an American, Freud wrote a book called The Question of Lay Analysis, in which he defended the right of non-doctors to practice psychoanalysis. And the American Psychoanalytic Association opposed his views. They said only psychiatrists should practice psychoanalysis, and Freud was pissed off with them. So he wrote a postscript for a second edition of this book after the American opposition to his view. He wrote a postscript, and in the best-known biography of Freud written by Jones, Jones says that “he said some things in this postscript, which I advised him to edit out, about the Americans, which I thought were impolitic. And so he agreed to remove three sentences.” So I went to the Library of Congress, where the original manuscript for that book is, and there I found the alleged three sentences, which turned out to be six paragraphs, that had been edited out.

You’ve never seen more of a diatribe against America in your life. I mean, it’s really unbelievable. It was a rant, second to none, by Freud. So this is the kind of stuff that’s been possible to include in the new edition.

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Did working on this project give you a clearer sense of Freud’s relevance to the present moment? And were there any other things that stood out as being potentially more relevant now than they were when Freud first wrote them?

I think that the most important thing along those lines, is that when the original standard edition came out in the 1950s and 1960s, psychoanalysis was in its heyday. And there was a kind of uncritical idealization of Freud. What I felt was necessary was to draw attention to the fundamentals. Freud made really fundamental contributions to the science of the mind, like recognizing the mind is embodied, that whatever else we are, we human beings are a species of animal; we have drives and instincts, like every other species does and that the mind does work on behalf of the body. It’s part of our biology. You can’t understand how the mind works unless you understand that it is fundamentally meeting demands made by the organism.

The fact that learning how to satisfy those needs, our phenotypic needs, that the critical period that lays down our personalized ways of going about learning in the environment we find ourselves in, how to satisfy these innate urges and drives and so on happens in earliest childhood. These things — embodied cognition, epigenetics and the crucial importance of those early years — we forget that these were innovations of Freud’s.

When Freud introduced the idea that what we learn in those early years, which then is so foundational for the future personality, is mostly unconscious, it was considered an oxymoron to speak of unconscious mental processes, because “mental” meant “conscious.” You can’t speak of unconscious and mental in the same breath. And now, nowadays, it’s just absolutely obvious that everyone knows and everybody in mental science accepts that a very large proportion of what makes us tick, we have no knowledge of at all.

I’ve tried to dial back on the hagiography and emphasize the fundamentals. A lot of what Freud said is unsustainable and indefensible now. It’s in this way that I’m trying to make a Freud for our times: recognizing this is an historical figure, that he is to psychology what Newton was to physics, or Darwin was to modern biology. But he’s an historical figure. It’s not the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, according to Freud.

Can a layperson still find something interesting when reading Freud in 2024, and possibly understand themselves better as a result of it?

I do think so. I mean, it’s of value in that respect, in the same way as the complete works of Shakespeare are. There are elements of Freud’s writing which are timeless. These are great classics — classics in the history of science, classics even in the literary sense. So I think that, from that point of view, in the same way as I gained something from reading Goethe today, and from reading Shakespeare and Plato and Aristotle — we don’t say “I’m not going to read Plato because it’s out of date.”

I remember when I first discovered Freud as a young man, it was revelatory — not because everything that he writes there is true, but because the fundamental sort of ideas reorientated you to what makes you tick, and how who you are now relates to who you were then and what happened to you and so on. I don’t think that that will be easily lost — the person, the recognition that something is true of me too. I think that that still applies.