Controversies in the English publication of Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, 1913-1933

The transition of Freud's Die Traumdeutung into its first English language incarnation as The Interpretation of Dreams, translated by A.A. Brill, took several years to effect, the process being beset with conceptual, practical, legal, and political obstacles. Anxieties over possible obscenity charges in Britain led to novel forms of censorship being applied to the first edition by its London publisher in 1913, while issues relating to the politics of translation and local British efforts to standardise psychoanalytic nomenclature would bedevil the text over its first two decades. In the context of the launch of the Revised Standard Edition (RSE), the present paper reveals these earlier issues for the first time. Having then considered the book's reception in both Britain and the United States, its sales and varying editions, the paper concludes with a discussion of the covert and contentious reediting of the work's third English edition, published in 1933. The shadow of this history inevitably falls on the RSE.