Published translated by James Strachey, in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis : 1933 : Sigmund Freud, SE XXII p1-182, See this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19320501) for further information.

Published in German in Vorlesung 32 – Angst und Triebleben, GW 15

Download in German and English at www.LacanianWorksExchange.net /Freud (19320630)

Note on translation of Angst into English

J. H. Sprott translated ‘Angst und Triebleben’ as ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’ (1933). Thereafter, it appears that ‘Anxiety’ is the recognized translation of ‘Angst’. 1909 is the first translation of ‘angst’ as ‘anxiety’ and there may be earlier examples. ‘Ûber die Berechtigung, von der Neurasthenie einen Bestimmten Symptomenkomplex als ‘Angstneurose’ Abzutrennen (1894)’ is translated by A. A. Brill as ‘The Justification for detaching from Neurasthenia a Particular Syndrome: the Anxiety-Neurosis’. All the other mistranslations follow.

Jacques Lacan read Sigmund Freud’s texts in German. He seems to be consistent in translating ‘angst’ as ‘l’angoisse’ (anguish) not ‘anxiété’.

James Strachey mostly translates Angst as Anxiety. Angst is used on this site, whenever I remember, as being nearer, though Anguish would probably do. Strachey also translates Trieb as Instinct when it should be Drive. So the German title, Angst und Triebleben, is not ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’ but ‘Angst and Life Drives’.

Citations

–Footnote 1 to Lecture XXV. See Lecture XXV (25) The Angst [Die Angst] : 1917 : Sigmund Freud at this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19170101)

p441 Footnote 1 PFL Vol 2, James Strachey writes ‘Freud’s first major discussion of this subject was in a paper on Anxiety Neurosis (1895b) [Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description “Angst (Anxiety) Neurosis’ : June 1894 [1895b] : Sigmund Freud, SE III, see this site /4 Sigmund Freud (18940601)] and his last Inhibitions, Symptoms & Angst (Anxiety) (1926d) [See this site /4 Sigmund Freud (19260101 or Index of Sigmund Freud’s texts]. Although, as he indicates in his Preface (p35 f. PFL or at New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis : May to August 1932 (1933) : Sigmund Freud at this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19320501)), the present lecture (Lecture XXV) was his most complete treatment of the problem of anxiety at the time of its delivery, his views were later revised in some important respects. For a statement of his final position, see Lecture 32 [Lecture XXXII – Angst and Life Drives : June 1932 [1933] : Sigmund Freud, this text] of his New Introductory Lectures (1933a). [See New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis : May to August 1932 (1933) : Sigmund Freud at this site /3 Sigmund Freud (19320501)]

–Guiding Remarks for a Congress on Feminine Sexuality : 1958 [Presented in Amsterdam, 5th September 1960] : Jacques Lacan, See this site /4 Jacques Lacan

P89 of Jacqueline Rose’s translation :

V The obscurity concerning the vaginal organ

However oblique a way of proceeding, noting a prohibition can serve as a prelude. … … Apart from the famous ‘lease-hold’ of rectal dependency on which Lou Andreas-Salomé took a personal stand, they have generally kept to metaphors whose pitch of idealism indicates nothing deserving preference over what the first comer might offer us by way of less intentional poetry.

Translator’s end-note, p827 of Bruce Fink’s translation :

(728,3) See Lou Andreas-Salomé’s “ ‘Anal’ und ‘Sexual’ “ in Imago 4 (1916) : p249. Sigmund Freud mentions this in SE VII p187, and SE XXII p101.

[ii] From New Introductory Lectures : 1932 [1933] : Sigmund Freud : Vol 2 of Penguin Freud Library : Lecture 32 – Anxiety and Instinctual Life : probably SE XXII p101

p134 PFL [p3609] Nor must you forget that I have only been able to give you very incomplete information. I may hurriedly add, perhaps, that interest in the vagina, which awakens later, is also essentially of anal-erotic origin. This is not to be wondered at, for the vagina itself, to borrow an apt phrase from Lou Andreas-Salomé, is ‘taken on lease’ from the rectum: in the life of homosexuals, who have failed to accomplish some part of normal sexual development, the vagina is once more represented by it. In dreams a locality often appears which was earlier a simple room but is now divided into two by a wall, or the other way round. This always means the relation of the vagina to the bowel.

–9th January 1963, Seminar X From the Anguish (De l’angoisse) (1962-1963) : from 14th November 1962 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19621114).

pVII 56 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, In the thirty-second introductory lecture to psychoanalysis, namely in the series of New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis which has been translated into French, Freud specifies that it is a matter of introducing something which has not, he says, in any way a purely speculative character, but it has been translated for us in the unintelligible French which you can form your own opinion of: “Mais il ne peut vraiment être question que de conceptions. En effet,il s’agit de trouver les idées abstraites, justes qui appliquées à la matière brute de l’observation y apporteront ordre et clarté“.

There is no full stop in German where I have shown it, and there is no enigma in the sentence: “It is a matter”, Freud tells us, “Sondern es handelt sich wirklich“, not truly but really, “of conceptions” (comma), namely I mean by that Vorstellungen, correct abstract representations, it is a matter of einzufahren them, of bringing them, of bringing to light, these conceptions whose application to the rohe Stoff, the raw material of observation, Beobachtung, will permit us to make emerge from them, to give birth from them to order and transparency.

It is obviously always distressing to entrust something as precious as the translation of Freud to ladies-in-waiting. [JE : Probably a reference to Princess Marie Bonaparte]

JE notes : Jacques Lacan also complains about translation in 6th February 1957 Seminar IV, when he reads a passage from Sigmund Freud in the original German. See EC Collectives’ translation at Seminar IV The Relation from Object (La relation d’objet) & Freudian Structures (1956-1957) : from 21st November 1956 : Jacques Lacan, this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19561121)

There follows an official translation, the German original and an internet translation.

Probably James Strachey : But it is truly a matter of conceptions – that is to say, of introducing the right abstract ideas, whose application to the raw material of observation will produce order and clarity in it.

The German original : Sondern es handelt sich wirklich um Auffassungen, d.h. darum, die richtigen abstrakten Vorstellungen einzuführen, deren Anwendung auf den Rohstoff der Beobachtung Ordnung und Durchsichtigkeit in ihm entstehen läßt.

An internet translation : But it’s really about opinions, i.e. about the correct abstract ones to introduce ideas, and their application to the raw material of observation allows order and transparency to arise within it.

–16th January 1963, Seminar X From the Anguish (De l’angoisse) (1962-1963) : from 14th November 1962 : Jacques Lacan, see this site /4 Jacques Lacan (19621114).

pVIII 68 of Cormac Gallagher’s translation, It is from this object o that there arises this dimension whose omission, whose elision, whose avoidance in the theory of the subject constituted the inadequacy up to the present of this whole coordination whose centre manifests itself as a theory of knowledge, gnoseology. Moreover this function of the object, in the novel structural topology that it requires, is quite tangible in Freud’s formulations, and specifically in those concerning the drive.

Let it suffice for me to – if you want to check it against a text, I would refer you to the XXXIInd lecture from the Introduction to Psychoanalysis, which can be found in what is called the new series of Vorlesungen, the one I quoted the last time – it is clear that the distinction between Ziel, the goal of the drive and the Objekt is something quite different to what you first think, that this goal and this object should be at the same place. And the statements of Freud that you will find in this place, in the lecture that I am designating for you, employ very striking terms, the first of which is the term eingeschoben: the object slides in it, goes somewhere – it is the same word which is used for the Verschiebung which designates displacement – the object in its essential function as the something which slips away is here highlighted as such, at the level of understanding which is properly our own.

On the other hand, there is, at this level the explicit opposition between two terms äusseres, external, outside, and inneres, inside. It is specified that the object is no doubt to be situated äusseres, on the outside, and on the other hand that the satisfaction of the tendency is only found to be accomplished in so far as it connects up with something which is to be considered in the inneres, the inside of the body, it is there that it finds its Befriedigung, its satisfaction. This also tells you that what I introduced for you as a topological function allows us to formulate in a clear fashion that what has to be introduced here to resolve this impasse, this riddle, is the notion of an outside before a certain interiorisation, of the outside which is situated here, o, before the subject at the locus of the Other, grasps himself in x in this specular form which introduces for him the distinction between the me and the not-me.

From Lecture XXXII, In German, Das Ziel kann am eigenen Körper erreicht werden, in der Regel ist ein äußeres Objekt eingeschoben, an dem der Trieb sein äußeres Ziel erreicht; sein inneres bleibt jedesmal die als Befriedigung empfundene Körperveränderung. Ob die Beziehung zur somatischen Quelle dem Trieb eine Spezifität verleiht und welche, ist uns nicht klar geworden.

From Lecture XXXII, in probably James Strachey’s translation, The aim can be achieved in the subject’s own body; as a rule an external object is brought in (eingeschoben), in regard to which the drive (instinct) achieves its external aim; its internal aim invariably remains the bodily change which is felt as satisfaction (Befriedigung). It has not become clear to us whether the relation of the drive (instinct) to its somatic source gives it a specific quality and if so what.