What's in a word? A brief reflection on why the understanding of Freud is not changed by replacing the word "instinct" with "drive" and the importance of reading in context.

Abstract

In this brief paper I argue that to understand Freud is to understand the meanings of his ideas. The choice of words to describe these ideas is usually relatively insignificant and does not in itself determine understanding. Thus, the translation of Trieb as "drive" rather than "instinct" does not change the phenomena that Freud addresses through the term Trieb, nor does it open us to the understanding of Freud's profound, complex and evolving ideas regarding these phenomena. To think that it can, in fact, limits understanding. This runs counter to a popular view that Strachey's translation of Trieb as "instinct" led the Anglo-American analytic community to see Freud as more biological and mechanistic than he actually was. Accepting the popular view would make the change of the term, which does occur in the Revised Standard Edition, seem especially significant. Evidence against this popular view may be seen in the fact that Klein and her followers, like Strachey himself, commonly use the term "instinct" and yet their understanding, which emerges from a close study of Freud in context and the phenomena to which he refers, maintains and develops the richness of Freud's thinking and does not at all offer a biological or mechanistic perspective. Important to the understanding of Freud in context are his early letters to Fliess, and thus it is very unfortunate that the unabridged version of these letters which became available in 1985 were not included in the RSE.