Freud Against the Grain. Psychoanalysis, Philology, History

Lecture by Dr Andreas Mayer, Research Professor (Directeur de recherche) at the CNRS and teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sociales in Paris.

Thanks to countless editions, Freud’s work is today read all over the world. So far, the history of psychoanalysis has mainly dealt with the personal, institutional and social aspects of this success story and less with the history of editions and translations. By drawing on the case of James Strachey’s Standard Edition and its recent revisions, this lecture will show to what extent a philological-historical approach can change our view of the author Freud. This not only raises the question of how his texts can be read against the grain (to use a well known formula by Walter Benjamin) in order to uncover hidden or repressed parts of their history. A text-historical examination of Freud's oeuvre also should enable us to develop productive criteria for a critique of the currently existing editions and translations.

Dr Andreas Mayer is Research Professor (Directeur de recherche) at the CNRS and teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sociales in Paris. His research focuses on the emergence of the human sciences since 1750 and their multiple relations to literature and the arts. He is the author of several monographs, notably Dreaming by the Book. ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ and the History of the Psychoanalytic Movement (with L. Marinelli, Other Press, 2003), Sites of the Unconscious. Hypnosis and the Emergence of the Psychoanalytic Setting (Chicago UP, 2013), Sigmund Freud (Junius, 2016, 3rd ed. 2022), and The Science of Walking. Investigations into Locomotion in the Long Nineteenth Century (Chicago UP, 2020).