1. The document provides a book review of Bruno Bettelheim's book "Freud and Man's Soul". Bettelheim was a professor interested in psychoanalysis and its mistranslations from German to English. 2. The review summarizes Bettelheim's background and career, noting he was born in Vienna like Freud and survived Nazi concentration camps. He wrote extensively about psychoanalysis and its application to topics like fairy tales and literacy. 3. In the reviewed book, Bettelheim aims to point out misunderstandings of Freudian theory that arose due to mistranslations between German and English. As a German speaker from Vienna, he felt compelled to address errors in how Freud has been translated and

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BOOK REVIEW
Bruno Bettelheim (1991). Freud and Man’s Soul (London: Penguin Books), pp. 112,
ISBN 0-14-014757-8
Bruno Bettelheim has served in various capacities at the University of Chicago. He
was professor of education, psychology, and psychiatry and the founding director of
its Orthogenic School.
Bettelheim is of great interest to historians of psychoanalysis because his Viennese
background bears a remarkable resemblance to that of Sigmund Freud himself.
Bettelheim was born and raised in Vienna and received his doctorate in psychology
from the University of Vienna. Like Freud, he was a German speaker and was
acquainted with German literature (as the concerns that he raises about translating
Freud make obvious in this book).
Bettelheim also survived the Nazi concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald
(1938-39) and went on to write about human nature in these extreme situations.
A recurrent theme in his work is how children who survived the Holocaust made
sense of their suffering as both children and in their later life in books entitled The
Informed Heart and Recollections and Reflections.
His other works include The Uses of Enchantment which is a psychoanalytic
interpretation of fairy tales. Bettelheim’s main purpose in this book was to explain
why children take to fairy tales so readily and why the dilemmas and fantasies of
childhood can be worked-through using fairy tales.
Bettelheim was also interested in a psychoanalytic interpretation of literacy; he
argued that literacy was not just a technical skill and that the ways we read or do not
read or misread what we do in fact read are affected by ‘unconscious factors.’ This
argument is an extension and application of the model for analysing performative
errors that Freud introduced in his book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

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Bettelheim’s goal in this book is to point out that there are wide-spread
misunderstandings of Freudian theory in the Anglo-American world because of
mistranslations of Freudian texts.
While a few articles have appeared on this theme in the psychoanalytic literature, it
has not been able to decisively correct the situation. That is because the most
authoritative translation of Freud’s work, the Standard Edition, uses a technical
vocabulary whose connotations are different from the German text.
Since most of Freud’s readers work with English translations and do not refer to the
German text (including Bettelheim’s students and psychoanalytic trainees at
Chicago), he felt compelled to do something about this.
Since Bettelheim was himself a German speaker and was raised in Vienna, he was
able to identify the literary and cultural connotations of the Freudian text more
easily than those who lacked this background. This book is an attempt to list some of
the more glaring errors in the translation of Freud from German to English.
But these errors are not just a linguistic problem; they also relate to the politics of
translation. What is at stake is the ongoing conflict between the physicians and the
humanists on who should or should not practice psychoanalysis and what the ideal
qualifications of a psychoanalyst should be in the United States and elsewhere.
The gist of Bettelheim’s argument is that Freud despite being a scientist was a
romantic at heart and that it was important for him to write in a way that is
comprehensible to the educated layperson. But in the attempt to make Freud
acceptable to the medical community, his technical terms (like most scientific terms
in general) were translated into Latin.
That is where, Bettelheim argues, psychoanalysis may have taken a wrong turn.
While those who can read Freud in the German (like him) can understand what is

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going on, several generations of psychoanalysts in the United States with no formal
exposure to German or Austrian culture are internalizing a version of Freud that is
quite different from the intention of the Freudian text.
Bettelheim therefore feels that he must explain what Freud’s intent was in writing in
the way that he did and what exactly constitute the connotations of the Freudian
text.
While it may not be possible for Bettelheim to revise the Freudian doctrine in its
entirety during his career as a psychoanalyst, he felt that he should at least reflect on
certain important themes and terms in psychoanalysis relating to the errors of
translation.
The different chapters in this book following the preface are an attempt to do this.
This is a short book that can be read in a couple of sittings; the reader can then return
to any of the given chapters when he feels the need to re-think the connotations of a
particular term.
This book should be placed next to dictionaries of psychoanalysis in the reference
section of libraries so that readers are able to appreciate what it is trying to do rather
than in the regular bookshelves where it will be misconstrued as just another book
on psychoanalysis.
The fifteen brief chapters in this book are almost like dictionary entries albeit of a
readable sort. It is best to describe them as brief lexical essays without using the
format of a dictionary since most lay readers are not acquainted with the reference
section of a library.
The main analytic distinction in this book is the difference between taking a scientific
as opposed to a romantic view of Freud’s technical vocabulary.
Bettelheim is a scientist by training but he feels that the essence of psychoanalysis is
the ability to appreciate the structural conflict between the scientific and romantic
world-views.

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Being a good psychoanalyst for Bettelheim is about knowing when to be scientific
and when to be romantic. This means that, like a literary critic, the psychoanalyst
must develop an appreciation for both the ‘denotative’ and ‘connotative’ meaning of
words.
Reading a poem in the way that it is meant to be read is about knowing when to
invoke the denotative meaning and when to invoke the connotative meaning in an
act of interpretation.
This is however not just about making a choice, but about being able to appreciate
the inherent tension between the ‘literal’ and ‘metaphorical’ and the denotative and
the connotative dimensions of language.
Only those who can withstand this endemic tension without becoming irritable can
become literary critics.
It is not just the poet but also the literary critics who must be capable of what the
English poet John Keats terms ‘negative capability.’
That then is what is required for the psychoanalyst as well.
That is why Freud was fond of pointing out that a background in literature,
linguistics, philology, and humanistic studies are an important prerequisite to make
sense of the ‘formations of the unconscious.’ In this book, Bettelheim demonstrates
that Freud was right after all.
While showing that psychoanalysis is a science and is useful for the medical
profession as a whole is not wrong by any means, it must not lose touch with its
linguistic dimensions or its clinical origins as a ‘talking cure.’
While Bettelheim may not categorically declare - like Jacques Lacan - that the
unconscious is structured like a language that, needless to say, is the implicit
theoretical assumption in books like this.

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Readers of Bettelheim may also want to read the American literary critic, Kenneth
Burke, who went further than anybody else in the literary establishment in
recognizing this truth.
My intention in this review is not to discuss all the lexical essays of Bettelheim since
this is a brief book and reading this review is not meant to be a substitute for reading
the book, but to call attention to those terms that are representative of the book as a
whole.
So, for instance, the term ‘sublimation’ which Freud uses repeatedly for the process
of converting sexual energies into acts of cultural achievements was introduced into
the German language by Goethe and not as most of us think by Sigmund or Anna
Freud.
Freud’s fondness for this term is probably related to his literary transference to
Goethe who is by critical consensus the greatest of all German writers.
Bettelheim’s point is that unless a reader of Freud is able to spontaneously relate
Goethe as an important literary precursor, he won’t be able to appreciate the literary
value of Freud’s texts.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that Goethe’s influence on Freud is not
reducible to him hearing Goethe’s flowery essay on Nature recited on a public
occasion.
But is based on a deeper engagement (that is not known to those who approach
Freud from only a scientific point of view or who are anxious to reduce him to easily
translatable technical terms).
The main ‘anxiety of influence,’ as Harold Bloom might put it, that Freud was
working-through in his collected works might well have been Goethe’s exemplary
achievement as a writer in German.

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While this fact may crossed the mind of a Bettelheim or a few scholars of romantic
and comparative literature, understanding Freud’s literary transference to Goethe
may well turn out to be an important event in Freud scholarship, and in our ability
to appreciate the literary status of psychoanalytic texts as opposed to just applying
its main precepts to read literary texts.
That is why it is important to pay attention to what a psychoanalyst with a Viennese
background like Bruno Bettelheim has to teach us about Freud.
So unless the ruminations of romantic scholars like Bettelheim, Bloom, Hartman, and
Steiner are brought into mainstream analytic literature, we will miss out on what is
really going on in Freud’s texts.
It is also important to remember that Freud tried to craft a technical vocabulary that
was in touch with the literary resonance of the Greek myths and the language of the
common people. In this, he shares the preoccupations of the romantic poets who
were seized by the possibility of incorporating the linguistic and psychological
insights of the common folk into their poems, doctrines and manifestos.
That is why Freud borrows his terms from myths like Eros and Psyche, Narcissus,
and Oedipus. Psyche in Greek had connotations that we attach to the term ‘soul’
rather than to its Latin equivalents like ‘self’ or ‘ego.’
The reification of the basic technical terms in ego-psychology and in the structural
theory of the mind (that was to attract the attention and critique of Jacques Lacan as
well) was a matter of concern for Bettelheim.

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So even though Bettelheim and Lacan have very different backgrounds, they are
both preoccupied with – as Lacan put it - the ‘poetics of the Freudian corpus.’
This was an attempt to focus on the poetic elements of the Freudian text rather than
to apply Freud to read poetic texts. It is also a way of demonstrating that it is not
possible to develop a technical vocabulary that is completely devoid of connotative
or figurative elements in the human sciences.
Bettelheim points out that even the word ‘psychoanalysis,’ which Freud coined in
1896, has different connotations in German as opposed to English and other
languages into which Freud’s texts have been translated.
In most languages the emphasis is on the term ‘analysis,’ but, in German, it is on the
term ‘psyche.’
This will be news to almost all readers of Freud.
It is possible for even Freud scholars to read psychoanalysis for a number of years
without being aware of how the term ‘psychoanalysis’ is itself subject to different
forms of analytic emphasis depending on the language in which Freud is being read.
So if there is lack of clarity on how to translate the term ‘psychoanalysis,’ it should
not be difficult to appreciate how the inadequacies of translation should affect the
technical vocabulary in English.
That is why it is important to understand the figural basis in any technical
vocabulary by differentiating between the literal and metaphorical uses of a term or
its denotative and connotative associations.
As Bettelheim puts it, ‘a true comprehension of psychoanalysis requires not only an
intellectual realization but a simultaneous emotional response; neither alone will do.
A well-chosen metaphor will permit both.’
The purpose of this book then is to enable the form of psychoanalytic literacy that will
permit both.
A telling example of a metaphor that has given rise to controversies is ‘mental
illness.’
For Freud, the purpose of psychoanalysis is not to cure in the medical sense of the
term, but to give the patient a better understanding of how the unconscious percolates
into every aspect of his life and decision-making.

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It is a way of taking forward the Greek ideal of ‘Know Thyself.’ Reifying the
technical vocabulary of psychoanalysis will lead to exactly the opposite of what
Freud wanted to accomplish with psychoanalysis.
An analysis is then seen as something that we do to others, to patients, and trainees.
Instead of leading to the Greek ideal of self-realization in the context of introspection
or free-association, the subject begins to flee himself like Oedipus in order to evade
his fate but winds up ironically doing what was predicted in the prophecy. These
then are the pre-conditions of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Psychoanalysts use stories like the Oedipus myth and ‘Death in Samarra’ to illustrate
the fact that the subject cannot run away from his fate; instead he must take
responsibility for it and work-through the affects that unconsciously attract him to
the forms of suffering that constitutes the stuff of Greek tragedy.
Bettelheim invokes the analytic distinction between Geisteswissenchaften and
Naturwissenchaften in the sciences to situate psychoanalysis; the former leads to the
analysis of singular situations and the latter to the discovery of laws of nature.
A psychoanalytic case-study is an instance of Geisteswissenchaften though it is
possible to claim – up to a point – that Freudian meta-psychology partakes of the
ambition - though not the levels of success of Naturwissenchaften.
So the answer to the question of whether psychoanalysis is a science or an art is that
it is both. The answer however depends on whether the focus is on meta-psychology
or whether it is on a particular analytic intervention.
While this analytic distinction is useful, it is by no means the case that the project of
a meta-psychology can be completed any more than physicists can arrive at a Theory
of Everything though that will not stop them from trying.
The difference between these approaches to scientific knowledge then is more a
matter of degree than a difference of kind.

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To conclude: the goal of Freudian psychoanalysis is not to cure in the technical sense
of the term, but to find a language or idiom in which the patient can think through
the ‘promptings of his unconscious.’
A point that Goethe made about his own psyche is relevant here.
Bettelheim seeks recourse precisely to this point as well when he notes that Goethe
felt at peace with himself only for four weeks in a life that lasted for seventy-five
years.
It is therefore important to know what psychoanalysis can or can’t do.
It certainly can’t make the unconscious go away; that is neither possible for desirable
since, as Bettelheim points out, ‘an inescapable sadness is part of the life of any
reflective person, but it is only part – by no means all – of living.’
Reading Bettelheim’s book will make it possible for readers, patients, and analysts to
moderate each other’s expectations on how psychoanalysis will get them to feel
more at home with their soul.
What this means is that all the stakeholders in the analytic enterprise will begin to
feel at home with the precepts of analysis only when they realize that it is not
possible to feel at home since the subject is necessarily divided by the constitutive
gaps in his unconscious.
Reifying the technical vocabulary of psychoanalysis then is not the solution; if
anything, it will only exacerbate the problem. This is a book that all English and non-
German readers of psychoanalysis should take seriously to situate the genealogy of
Freud’s main concepts, precepts, and technical terms.
SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN