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traced to the conceptual development, and terminological complexity and ambiguity surrounding the ‘I’ / ‘ego’. While it has been a long-standing tradition in philosophy and psychiatry to translate German Ich as Ego (Meynert 1885; Solms 2019), some psychoanalytic authors have questioned the utility of this practice, followed by Standard Edition of Strachey and the Glossary Committee (James and Alix Strachey, Anna Freud, Ernest Jones and Joan Riviere), for psychoanalysis, and especially as it concerns complexity and ambiguity of Freudian Ich. Freud used Ich – “I”, which Strachey translated as “ego”, for both a mental structure and psychic agency, as well as the more personal, subjective experiential “self”. Thus, he never separated the metapsychological “ego” from the experiential “self”. Some contemporary authors who compared both German original and Strachey’s translation (Kernberg, 1982; Laplanche and Pontalis 1973; Gammelgaard 2003) consider the ambiguity a strength rather than a weakness of Freud’s concept of “Ich”, conveying a richness of internal tension between the experiential-subjective, and self-reflective-objectifying properties of the concept of the Ich/I. In their view, Strachey’s shift in the terms from ‘Ich’ to ‘ego’ strives for consistency, but it does so at the expense of Freud’s terminology: the dual aspect of I gets lost. In certain instances, Freud (1930a,b) equates self with I. In “Civilization and its Discontents” he uses the term “Selbst” for Self as well as “Ich” in one sentence, e.g. in German original: “Normalerweise ist uns nichts gesicherter als das Gefühl unseres Selbst, unseres eigenen Ichs.” (Freud 1930b, p. 423). Corresponding Strachey’s English translation reads: “Normally, there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, of our own ego” (Freud, 1930a, p. 65). In other instances, Freud equates self with the whole person. Writing about ‘the sick Ich’ (Freud 1940a,b), he writes: “Das kranke Ich verspricht uns vollste Aufrichtigkeit, …, wir sichern ihm strengste Diskretion…” (Freud 1940a, p. 98). Strachey’s English translation reads: “The sick ego promises us the most complete candor … we assure the patient of the strictest discretion …” (Freud 1940b, p. 173). Another page in the “Outline” depicts self as an aspect of I, when Freud states: “… wenn das Ich einer Versuchung erfolgreich widerstanden hat, etwas zu tun, was dem Überich anstössig ware, fühlt es sich in seinem Selbstgefühl gehoben…” (Freud 1940a, p. 137). In Strachey’s translation, “…if the ego has successfully resisted a temptation to do something which would be objectionable to the superego, it feels raised in its self-esteem …” (Freud 1940b, p. 206). In the same text (Freud 1940a,b), summarizing ideas from previous writings (Freud 1914), Freud contrast ‘Ichliebe’ and ‘Objektliebe’ (Freud 1940a, p.71), obviously self-love in contrast to object-love. Strachey’s translation translates this as “the contrast between ego-love and object-love” (Freud 1940b, p.148). Such translation, rendering the ambiguity confusing, may have contributed to Heinz Hartmann’s (1950) need for correction via progressive conceptual separation of ego from self,
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