Beyond Bruno Bettelheim's 'Freud and Man's Soul': The need for further translations of Sigmund Freud's works

The publication of Bruno Bettelheim's Freud and Man's Soul is an important contribution to the continuing controversy concerning Sigmund Freud's theories, translations, and truths. According to Bruno Bettelheim, Freud's theories and truths have been misrepresented by the translation process, supervised by James Strachey in preparing the Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud. Bettelheim believes that Strachey was influenced by the scientific community, producing a translation which does not address the humanistic, cultural, aesthetic, philosophical, and literary qualities possessed by Freud.;Bettelheim's intention is to bring us closer to Freud's style and personality as a humanist rather than a scientific specialist by examining cultural influences of Freud's original German words written in Vienna from 1901-1930. In order to examine Bettelheim's criticism, Freud's earlier writings are investigated in the original German, exploring whether or not Bettelheim's observations bring us closer to Freud's original intentions in the text, and discovering whether or not any deviations or distortions from the original works have been caused by Strachey's conscious or unconscious neglect. Then the middle, later, and additional works by Freud, including correspondence, essays, addresses not included by Bettelheim, are examined using a hermeneutic, phenomenological approach. Using Bettelheim's remarks and key German words, a re-examination of Freud's original texts should affirm or deny Bettelheim's critique. If Bettelheim's thesis is correct, that some of the literary, stylistic, mythopoetic, philosophical, and religious emphasis upon the "soul" has been lost in the translations of Freud, then the German texts of Freud, the language, the style, the literary devices, the cultural context of words, should reveal a much more humanistic, rather than scientific treatment of Freud's works. Since Strachey emphasizes the naturalistic and empirical presuppositions in translation and Bettelheim only translates selected words from the titles of Freud's works, future possible translators, supported by the insights from hermeneutics and phenomenology, would clear the path for new insights into Freud's works in the next century.;Ultimately, the contribution of this study is to allow us to see Freud as a philosopher, a dreamer, an inquiring "soul," searching for his own place in the history of civilization. A phenomenological approach to Freudian discourse, using the methods of Edmund Husserl, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jurgen Habermas, and Paul Ricoeur, would re-examine Freud's texts, unveiling some of the intentions in his consciousness, language, and social context in creating a philosophical horizon for the search for the soul. Using some of the methods of phenomenology, a translation method will be developed, based upon the following procedures, founded upon Edmund Husserl's method of "phenomenological reduction". (Abstract shortened by UMI.)...