EDITH KURZWEIL
51
mounts . What must the foremost genius of our century
be
protected
from? Objectively , since neither misinterpretations nor deprecations
of his character can diminish Freud's stature, we must conclude that
the battles over reinterpretations are to determine which road to the
unconscious is to prevail now. (As an historian, Fichtner is as much
out of the fray as I-as a sociologist-am.) Fichtner noted that even
minutiae about Freud's handwriting, his moves to and from Gothic
and Latin script, his scribbled notes in pencil, his use of dialect, of
Yiddish and English expressions in otherwise excellent German have
led to misreadings - some of these due to the terminology and per–
ceptions of his time, others to garbled and badly annotated transla–
tions , and to abbreviations .
Among those addressing this issue was Patricia Touton-Victor
of the University of Cambridge. She was surprised that she could
not find the first translations of Freud into French in the archives of
French publishers; that these were in obscure journals; and that the
corpus started to appear only in 1920. Touton-Victor reminded us
that his ideas were rejected; that those of Janet were preferred; and
that Regis and Hesnard , who introduced "Psychoanalysis of Neuro–
ses and Psychoses" in 1914, complained that "its language is difficult
to translate because it unfortunately leans on the taste of German
philosophy for the heterogeneity of its vocabulary." Freud, on the
other hand, was found to prefer English and even Spanish to
French. He allegedly overcame his reluctance almost exclusively
through the close friendship he established with the Princess , Marie
Bonaparte. Because she translated his works, however belatedly, the
language of psychoanalysis was accepted in France. (Many Viennese
have yet to overcome
their
chauvinism.)
Currently, the focus on language and the juxtapositions of the
same words over time, and of words that might have been uttered or
written by Freud but weren't , is a thread that more or less ran
through all the contributions by the French - historians and psycho–
analysts alike. Madelaine and Henri Valmorel, the least involved
among them in this "linguistic psychoanalysis ," demonstrated that
Freud drew on German romanticism and on a number of other cur–
rents as well- the Enlightenment,
Sturm und Drang,
Goethe's and
Schiller's classicism, and his "beloved German language." The Val–
morels traced the genealogy of the word drive
(Trieb)
in its various
contexts and concluded that Freud came to no longer glorify the bio–
logical implications of
Trieb
but opposed it to the Enlightenment,
