Studies in Hysteria (Penguin Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Your order number is 0334792
Review: "Hello? Name? What's your last name Jack? Order number 0334792, that you? You understand this model is the international version? The table of contents and bibliography is in Japanese. Hey, I don't make the rules, Jack. I can cancel your order right now if you're gonna give me mouth. What's that? The US version is gonna cost fifty dollars extra. Well, the international version also is missing chapters 11 and 13. Well, they're not exactly missing... but they're in Bulgarian. And the cover is on backwards... I AM the manager...

Rating:
Summary: I'd rather be reading a good adult book
Review: First of all I had to dock a star for the introduction, which is by an English professor (apparently English is the queen of the sciences now). In this "text" she waves around her own gas, occasionally cupping it with her hands and sniffing it. Give a listen to some of this post-modernistic drivel [the first case study in here is of "Anna O."]: "With its combination of a palindrome and a big circle, the name 'Anna O.' might seem to have been invented expressly to serve as the alpha and omega [get it? - "A" and big "O"], the fons et origo of the new therapeutic method." Let me get this straight: the name is the source of the therapeutic method? Maybe they should've got a logic professor to write this.
Let's move on. The first case study by Freud is of a certain matron named "Frau Emmy von N." Page 52: "What she says is completely coherent... This makes it all the more disconcerting that every few minutes she should suddenly break off, contort her face into an expression of horror and revulsion, stretch out her hand toward me with her fingers splayed and crooked, and in an altered, fearful voice call out the words 'Keep still - don't say anything - don't touch me!' She is probably under the influence of a recurring and horrible hallucination... This interpolation is then concluded with equal suddenness, and the patient continues with what she has been saying... without explaining or excusing her behavior..." I can tell you that she wasn't hallucinating jack. My diagnosis is that this broad is a royal pain in the vas deferens. The best treatment would be a stout slap across the face. The fact that Freud took this piece of garbage seriously and let her jerk him around for weeks made me lose all confidence in him.
All right, let's get down to brass tacks. The only reason you're interested in this book is that you hope to get some very, very faint sex kicks from it. You've heard that hysteria has a sexual basis, and you want to hear more about that - but not unless it's trickled through a ton of theoretical sheep-excrement.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Translation
Review: This new translation, by Nicola Luckhurst, of Freud's Studien über Hysterie is a remarkable achievement, surpassing James Strachey's classic translation.

What makes it better? It stays very close to the text - obviously. Paradoxically, this means that the text is rougher, and more open. Luckhurst's translation preserves Freud's physical metaphors, the peculiarity of style and with this the feel that Freud is developing a new language for his new science, psychoanalysis. In this translation, Freud is not the dour, august professor but the young explorer discovering sexuality and desire.

Luckhurst has an exquisitely sensitive ear for Freud's language. For example, she picks up a number of metaphors related to pregnancy, labor, and childbirth that had disappeared in Strachey's translation: "These metaphors, often neutralized in earlier translations, seem important in that they indicate an unconscious feminine identification - by which I mean Freud's empathy (or counter-transference) for his patients as women and as mothers. Recovering these metaphors may allow hysteria to signify differently, as we hear Freud's patients dis-identify with their maternal or pregnant self, and project it into the psychoanalyst."

For anyone interested Freud and psychoanalysis, the Translator's Preface is worth the price of the book.

In sum: this new translation of one of the founding texts of psychoanalysis is a great read - and it will change the way we read Freud.