Mark Solms spent 30 years revising Freud's Standard Edition after discovering Erwin Stengel's unfinished translation was full of errors and missing papers. He's now completing his original goal: publishing Freud's neuroscientific writings in English for the first time.
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It was not my aim to revise the translation of Freud's psychological works. I wanted to translate Freud's neuroscientific works because they have never been translated.
So that was a new project or there's something—
The new project is a separate thing that I did. But the There was a book published in 1979 called— by Frank Sulloway called Freud: Biologist of the Mind. And it went in some detail into his neuroscientific career. And there was a little footnote which said most people don't realize how deeply steeped in neuroscience Freud was. That's because his neuroscientific works have never been published in English. And but that's about to be corrected. The Hogarth Press is bringing out a 4-volume set under the editorship of Erwin Stengel. So I ordered it through my bookseller and it never came. And so the bookseller wrote to the Hogarth Press and they said Stengel died. And so it never came out. So I went to London. I mean, I was going to London anyway. And I met the director of the Hogarth Press. I said, can I see Stengel's translations? Presumably, they were pretty nearly done, and maybe I can just read them. So he very kindly gave me these 4 box files full of Stengel's translations, and they were a dog's breakfast. They were terrible translations, and they were very far from finished. Not only the actual translations being very rough and ready, but there were, there were many, many, many papers that were not there, you know, that he hadn't even— he didn't even seem to know about half of Freud's neuroscientific works. So I shifted from being a potential buyer of these 4 volumes to becoming their editor. Then while I was doing that, this was in the early 1990s, Whenever I came across something of psychological interest, I published it, you know, because psychoanalysts are interested in what Freud has to say about things. So I published a few papers, a few psychological works of Freud's that I found that hadn't been translated. And so then the publishers of the psychological works, the 24 volumes, they decided under pressure of all the criticism of the stretchy translation that they want to bring out a revised edition. So they were aware that I was doing Freud translation because of those few publications I made. So they roped me into taking on this other edition, which I had no idea what I was getting myself into. You know, that was 30 years ago, which is—
it's good.
There are many things in life that we would never have undertaken if we had known in advance what what it would entail. So that was 1994. Then for the last 30 years, I worked on that. And now, literally 30 years later, I'm publishing that. And now finally getting back to what I wanted to do in the first place, which is the neuroscience, the 4 volumes of Freud's neuroscientific works.
I thought elephants had the longest gestation periods, but yours beats that. Quite, quite a bit. We'll finish with, um, a few days ago I got a photograph from my son and his wife. They got married in August and she's 4 and a half months pregnant, and they sent me the, uh, or the sonogram. The sonogram.
The sonogram.
Yeah, it's a little guy.
Yeah, wonderful. I've seen that. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. Yeah.
And I figure he's either very smart or could be both. And he knows how to self-soothe. How wonderful. If we could now teach fetuses in the womb to find their thumb and give themselves comfort, I think that's the next project.
Wonderful.
Anyway, I'm going to let you go. And I thank you.
Great talking to you, as it always is. And thanks for the videos. It was great to watch those.
Oh, thank you for watching and for this time. And again, hearty, hearty, hearty congratulations. The Hidden Spring, of course, anybody listening, journey to the source of consciousness was just— grabbed me so much. I had to be in contact with you. And thank you for all the kindnesses and things you say. You're a very good man. Absolutely. Thank you.
