James Strachey
Encyclopedia
Alix Strachey
Alix Strachey , née Sargant-Florence, was an American-born British psychoanalyst and with her husband the translator into English of the works of Sigmund Freud....
, a translator of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud , born Sigismund Schlomo Freud , was an Austrian neurologist who founded the discipline of psychoanalysis...
into English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
. He is perhaps best known as the general editor of the ' Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud...the international authority'.
Early life
He was a son of Lt-Gen Sir Richard StracheyRichard Strachey
Lieutenant-General Sir Richard Strachey, GCSI, FRS , British soldier and Indian administrator, third son of Edward Strachey and grandson of Sir Henry Strachey, 1st Baronet was born on 24 July 1817, at Sutton Court, Stowey, Somerset...
and Lady (Jane) Strachey, called the enfant miracle as his father was 70 and his mother 47. Some of his nieces and nephews, who were considerably older than James, called him Jembeau or Uncle Baby. His parents had thirteen children, of whom ten lived to adulthood.
He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
, where he took over the rooms used by his older brother Lytton Strachey
Lytton Strachey
Giles Lytton Strachey was a British writer and critic. He is best known for establishing a new form of biography in which psychological insight and sympathy are combined with irreverence and wit...
, and was known as 'the Little Strachey'; Lytton was now 'the Great Strachey'. At Cambridge, Strachey fell deeply in love with the poet Rupert Brooke
Rupert Brooke
Rupert Chawner Brooke was an English poet known for his idealistic war sonnets written during the First World War, especially The Soldier...
, who did not return his affections. He was himself pursued by mountaineer George Mallory
George Mallory
George Herbert Leigh Mallory was an English mountaineer who took part in the first three British expeditions to Mount Everest in the early 1920s....
—conceding to his sexual advances—by Harry Norton, and by economist John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes
John Maynard Keynes, Baron Keynes of Tilton, CB FBA , was a British economist whose ideas have profoundly affected the theory and practice of modern macroeconomics, as well as the economic policies of governments...
, with whom he also had an affair. His love of Brooke was a constant, however, until his death in 1915, which left Strachey "shattered".
James was assistant editor of The Spectator
The Spectator
The Spectator is a weekly British magazine first published on 6 July 1828. It is currently owned by David and Frederick Barclay, who also owns The Daily Telegraph. Its principal subject areas are politics and culture...
, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group
Bloomsbury Group
The Bloomsbury Group or Bloomsbury Set was a group of writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists who held informal discussions in Bloomsbury throughout the 20th century. This English collective of friends and relatives lived, worked or studied near Bloomsbury in London during the first half...
or 'Bloomsberries' when he became familiar with Alix Sargant Florence
Alix Strachey
Alix Strachey , née Sargant-Florence, was an American-born British psychoanalyst and with her husband the translator into English of the works of Sigmund Freud....
, though they first met in 1910. They moved in together in 1919 and married in 1920.
Soon afterwards they moved to Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
, where James, an admirer of Freud, began a psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis
Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...
with the great man, something which he would claim to Lytton 'provided "a complete undercurrent for life"'. Freud asked the couple to translate some of his works into English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
, and this became their lives' work: they became 'my excellent English translators, Mr and Mrs James Strachey'.
The psychoanalytic turn
Looking back forty years later at this turning-point, Strachey commented in a 'disarming passage' to his fellow analysts on his then qualifications as a psychoanalytic candidate, as compared to modern times: 'A discreditable academic career with the barest of B. A. degrees, no medical qualifications...no experience of anything except third-rate journalism. The only thing in my favour was that at the age of thirty I wrote a letter out of the blue to Freud, asking him if he would take me on as a student'.He continued by saying that, having spent a couple of years in Vienna, 'I got back to London in the summer of 1922, and in October, without any further ado, I was elected an associate member of the [Psycho-Analytical] Society...A year later, I was made a full member. So there I was, launched on the treatment of patients, with no experience, with no supervision, with nothing to help me but some two years of analysis with Freud'.
He concluded wryly that the modern 'curriculum vitae is essential. Whether it is possible for it to become over-institutionalized is an open question. Is it worthwhile to leave a loophole for an occasional maverick?...if the curriculum vitae had existed forty years ago, you wouldn't have had to listen to these remarks tonight'.
Nevertheless Freud had decided that 'the Stracheys should become members (full) of the Society....To be sure their conflicts have not been decided, but we need not wait so long, we can only instigate the processus which has to be fed by the factors of life'. James and Alix thus both become practising analysts; James subsequently began publishing his own original articles; and the two of them (in collaboration with Jones and Joan Riviere
Joan Riviere
Joan Hodgson Riviere was a British psychoanalyst, who was both Freud's earliest translator and an influential writer on her own account.-Life and career:...
) began translating Freud's works in earnest, as well as writings by a number of other European psychoanalysts such as Karl Abraham
Karl Abraham
-Further reading:* Freud, S. . Mourning and Melancholia. Standard Edition, 14, 305-307.* May-Tolzmann, U. . The Discovery of the Bad Mother: Abraham’s contribution to the theory of Depression...
. Their translation of Freud's works, in twenty-four volumes, remains the standard edition of Freud's works to this day, and according to Holroyd
Michael Holroyd
Sir Michael De Courcy Fraser Holroyd, FRHS, FRSL is an English biographer.-Life:Holroyd was born in London and educated at Eton College, though he has often claimed Maidenhead Public Library as his alma mater....
a German publishing house considered retranslating their translation of the Master's works back into German, because they were a work of art and scholarship, with a maze of additional footnotes and introductions.
While the Stracheys were instrumental in encouraging Melanie Klein
Melanie Klein
Melanie Reizes Klein was an Austrian-born British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had an impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis...
to come to England to pursue her analytic discoveries, both remained loyal to Freud at the same time, and stood as part of the Middle Group in the wartime Controversial discussions
Controversial discussions
The Controversial discussions were a protracted series of 'Scientific Meetings' of the British Psychoanalytical Society which took place between October 1942 and February 1944 between the Viennese school and the supporters of Melanie Klein...
between the proponents of Melanie Klein and of Anna Freud
Anna Freud
Anna Freud was the sixth and last child of Sigmund and Martha Freud. Born in Vienna, she followed the path of her father and contributed to the newly born field of psychoanalysis...
. 'James Strachey characterized the battle between the two women in his own wryly sensible way: "My own view is that Mrs K. has made some highly important contributions...but that it's absurd to make out (a) that they cover the whole subject or (b) that their validity is axiomatic. On the other hand, I think it is equally ludicrous for Miss F. to maintain that [Psychoanalysis] is a Game Preserve belonging to the F. family"'.
Psychoanalytic writings
Strachey published three articles in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis between 1930 and 1935. In the first, on "Some Unconscious Factors in Reading"[1930], he explored the 'oral ambitions...[in] "taking in" words, by hearing or reading, both unconsciously meaning "eating"' - something of central significance 'for reading addictions as well as for neurotic disturbances of reading'.In his 1931 article on the "Precipitating Factor in the Etiology of the Neuroses", Strachey examined those 'experiences that disturb the equilibrium between warded-of impulses and warding-off forces, an equilibrium hitherto relatively stable'.
His most important contribution, however, was that of 1934 on "The Nature of the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis"- a seminal article arguing that 'the fact that the pathogenic conflicts, revived in the transference, are now experienced in their full emotional content makes the transference interpretation so much more effective than any other interpretation'. Half a century later, the role of 'mutative transference interpretations as described by Strachey (1934)' was still serving as a starting-point for discussion.
His 1962 "Sketch" of Freud's life and work, which serves as an introduction to the Penguin Freud Library, is a genial but wide-ranging survey - grounded in his intimate knowledge of the Freudian corpus, but perhaps with somewhat of the spirit he himself observed in Martin Freud's memoir of his father, Glory Reflected: 'this delightful and amusing book serves to redress the balance from more official biographies...and reveals something of Freud as he was in ordinary life'.
The translations
In one of his last letters to Freud, Ernest Jones wrote that 'You probably know you have the reputation of not being the easiest author to translate'. Certainly when translation into English first began, 'the earliest versions were not always felicitous...casual and at times fearfully inaccurate'. With the coming of the Stracheys, however, 'translations began to improve: in 1924 and 1925, a small English team brought out Freud's Collected Papers, in four volumes' which have been described as 'the most vigorous translations into English' of all time.Nevertheless the 24 volume Standard Edition remains Strachey's crowning glory. 'It is a heroic enterprise. Where necessary, it offers variorum texts; it wrestles with intractable material...and it introduces each work, even the slightest paper, with indispensable bibliographical and historical information'.
The most 'obvious flaw in this translation was the substitution of esoteric neologisms for the plain German terms Freud preferred', so that for example his "I" and his "It" become the Ego and the Id. Lacan
Lacan
Lacan is surname of:* Jacques Lacan , French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist** The Seminars of Jacques Lacan** From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the Dislocation of Power, a book on political philosophy by Saul Newman** Lacan at the Scene* Judith Miller, née Lacan...
took particular exception to 'the translation of instinct for Trieb [drive]...thus basing the whole edition on a complete misunderstanding since Trieb and instinct have nothing in common'. Bruno Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim
Bruno Bettelheim was an Austrian-born American child psychologist and writer. He gained an international reputation for his work on Freud, psychoanalysis, and emotionally disturbed children.-Background:...
went still further, arguing that 'anyone who reads Freud only in Strachey's English translation cannot understand Freud's concern with man's soul'.
While accepting that 'Strachey's translation was also an act of interpretation and it has not been hard to find spots where he went astray', the fact remains that 'Freud was delighted with the work Strachey succeeded in doing'; whilst even into the Twenty-First Century 'the German editions have relied on Strachey's editorial apparatus, which should be a testimony to what he accomplished'.
James Strachey, Holroyd, and "Lytton Strachey"
James is mentioned in the text of Holroyd’s biography of Lytton Strachey, and in the introduction to the 1971 Penguin edition and the 1994–95 revised edition. James was the literary executor for his brother Lytton, so Holroyd saw James and Alix frequently over the five years from 1962 that he was researching and writing the first edition (published in 1967-68) of his biography of Lytton. He describes James as "almost an exact replica of Freud himself, though with some traces of Lytton’s physiognomy – the slightly bulbous nose in particular. He wore a short white beard because, he told me, of the difficulty of shaving. He had had it now for some fifty years. He also wore spectacles, one lens of which was transparent, the other translucent. It was only later that I learnt he had overcome with extraordinary patience a series of eye operations that had threatened to put an end to his magnum opus".James made many objections to Holroyd's initial drafts of the biography, and 'Holroyd made the brilliant decision to publish James's acid-sounding comments as footnotes on the pages....James's testy objections helped liven up the text'.
James was also an authority on Haydn
Joseph Haydn
Franz Joseph Haydn , known as Joseph Haydn , was an Austrian composer, one of the most prolific and prominent composers of the Classical period. He is often called the "Father of the Symphony" and "Father of the String Quartet" because of his important contributions to these forms...
, Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...
and Wagner
Richard Wagner
Wilhelm Richard Wagner was a German composer, conductor, theatre director, philosopher, music theorist, poet, essayist and writer primarily known for his operas...
, and contributed notes and commentaries to Glyndebourne
Glyndebourne
Glyndebourne is a country house, thought to be about six hundred years old, located near Lewes in East Sussex, England. It is also the site of an opera house which, with the exception of its closing during the Second World War, for a few immediate post-war years, and in 1993 during the...
programmes