Sigmund Freud is having something of a moment. Psychoanalysis is suddenly everywhere: on such hit shows as Couples Therapy, where troubled lovers probe their unconscious minds; in upstart magazines, including Parapraxis, which applies the tenets of the talking cure to modern life and politics; at bookstores, where new titles on the Viennese psychologist, who died in 1939, hit shelves at a steady clip; and, of course, on social media, where Freudian memes abound.
Now, Freud is getting yet another update for the modern age. In June, Rowman & Littlefield published a reimagined version of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, widely considered to be the bedrock of the psychoanalytical canon. Translated and edited by James Strachey throughout the 1950s and ‘60s, the final volume of the Standard Edition was published by Hogarth Press 50 years ago, in 1974. The new 24-volume, 8,100-plus-page Revised Standard Edition has been three decades in the making, with psychoanalyst and neuropsychologist Mark Solms spearheading the once-in-a-generation project.
In 1989, Solms began translating Freud’s neuroscientific writings, which amount to more than 200 individual titles, fewer than 10 of which had previously been translated into English. This endeavor put him on the radar of the U.K.–based Institute of Psychoanalysis (IOPA), which had recently decided, amid growing criticisms of Strachey’s translations, that a revised version of the Standard Edition was sorely needed. The IOPA appointed Solms as editor of the Revised Standard Edition in 1994.
Assembling the Revised Standard Edition, Solms said, was “a mammoth task.” He not only needed to revise Strachey’s translations, but “update his editorial apparatus” to accommodate and incorporate the reams of Freud scholarship that have come out since the 1960s, much of which needed to be translated. Plus, Solms had to add and translate “some 50-odd” new works by Freud—some omitted from the Standard Edition, others discovered in the last half century—which include previously unknown notes, letters, and essays on such topics as homosexuality and women’s rights, which Solms said “reveal Freud to have been more progressive than has been appreciated.”
Solms was uniquely suited to the task of translating Freud's newly discovered writings, having grown up in a part of Namibia where the late-19th-century German dialect of Freud's era is still spoken. He is also an ambitious and fastidious scholar and editor, completely reworking the Standard Edition's index and bibliography and adding nearly 1,400 entries throughout the editing process. Solms lamented that the sheer amount of work required to put together the edition, which he did alongside his day job as a neuroscientist and clinician, “is why, sadly, it has taken me a full 30 years to complete it!”
The two dozen volumes of the original Standard Edition were copublished from 1953 to 1974 by the IOPA and Hogarth Press, which was established in 1917 by Virginia and Leonard Woolf and is now an imprint of Penguin Random House. Solms said that it was “initially assumed” that the IOPA would publish the Revised Standard Edition with PRH, but the IOPA’s publications committee instead decided to invite a number of publishers to make proposals. Rowman & Littlefield was selected unanimously. “The selection was made, above all,” Solms said, “on the basis that they were an independent publisher that would give the Revised Standard Edition the ‘bespoke’ attention that it requires and deserves.”
R&L was eager to make the Freudian canon “available to a new generation of scholars, practitioners, students, and general readers” with the Revised Standard Edition, said Julie Kirsch, VP and publisher of R&L. In its pitch, R&L proposed a plan to make the Revised Standard Edition available globally in print and digital editions, and to build a secondary product portfolio of works related to the new edition, which Kirsch believes sealed the deal. Plus, she added, seeing as R&L “already had a strong presence in psychoanalytic publishing” thanks to its 2003 acquisition of Jason Aronson Publishers, the publisher felt confident it could not only do the job right but reach the work’s intended audience.
“The RSE has made it increasingly possible to understand the continuity between Freud’s work as a neuroscientist and his role as the architect of psychoanalysis,” Kirsch said. “We need this revised edition so that Freud’s work speaks clearly to a society that has changed in so many ways, while his insights into the fundamental nature of human beings remain a foundation of our understanding of ourselves.”
As an indie publisher, R&L hopes to “continue the legacy” of Hogarth, which was a small press when it published the Standard Edition, Kirsch said. She echoed Solms in noting that the independent spirit and business model of both R&L and Hogarth was in large part why the IOPA chose to partner with R&L, just as it had with Hogarth a century before. (Hogarth Press and the IOPA first agreed to copublish Freud’s works in English in 1924.) The Revised Edition was copublished by the IOPA and R&L’s academic division, which was acquired by Bloomsbury in May, and is distributed by National Book Network in the U.S. and Ingram Publisher Services internationally.
As for the forces behind Freud's resurgence, Kirsch and Solms agree that it's because his ideas are both timeless and timely. Kirsch calls Freud's theories “essential to understanding the human condition," not to mention ubiquitous in everyday life. “It’s easy to forget how many of his concepts have entered our mainstream vocabulary,” said Kirsch, who cited his “enormous impact” on art, literary criticism, philosophy, and popular culture.
Solms sees the culture's "growing disenchantment" with the treatment of psychiatric drugs as a panacea, as well as “the fact that Freud’s major scientific claims have been increasingly supported—perhaps surprisingly—by neuropsychological research findings,” as reasons for Freud’s renewed relevance. He added that, because "we are living in such troubled times," Freud's work has become a salient reminder of "all of how irrational we human beings are."
