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for instance, which in the
Standard Edition
reads as follows:
    ON NARCISSISM: AN INTRODUCTION
    I
    The term narcissism is derived from clinical description and was chosen by Paul Näcke in 1899 to denote the attitude of a person who treats his own body in the same way in which the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated – who looks at it, that is to say, strokes it and fondles it till he obtains complete satisfaction through these activities. Developed to this degree, narcissism has the significance of a perversion that has absorbed the whole of the subject's sexual life, and it will consequently exhibit the characteristics which we expect to meet with in the study of all perversions.
    If this were handed in by a student as a translation exercise, it would end up covered in red pencil, with everything from light squigglesto heavy underlinings and multiple exclamation marks, for it is so full of slips and shifts and omissions as to be a travesty of Freud's original. At the less serious end of the spectrum, ‘attitude’ would merit at least a squiggle: Freud's word is
Verhalten
, ‘behaviour’; so, too would ‘developed to this degree’: Freud's
in dieser Ausbildung
simply means ‘in this form’ or, more loosely, ‘in this sense’; the phrase ‘has the significance of’ would also elicit a tut-tut and a squiggle, since the German translates quite simply as ‘means’ or ‘signifies’ (the second sentence would thus more crisply and more correctly begin ‘Narcissism in this form means…’). We can also cavil at ‘absorbed’, as it loses the force of Freud's graphic metaphor
aufgesogen
, which in this context means ‘sucked up’ or ‘swallowed up’; while ‘exhibit[s] the characteristics’ is an unduly loose rendering of words that more strictly mean ‘is subject to the expectations…’ (
unterliegt den Erwartungen
). A more serious distortion lurks in the words ‘a person who treats his own body in the same way in which
the body of a sexual object is ordinarily treated
’: what Freud's German unambiguously says is that the narcissist (in Näcke's sense of the term) treats his own body in the same way in which he –
the narcissist himself
– might treat that of any other sexual object.
    Whilst none of these infelicities makes much difference on its own, their cumulative effect is to alter the whole tone and thrust of the passage (and we find similar shifts if we take almost any paragraph in Freud's original German and compare it with the translation offered in the
Standard Edition
). They are as nothing, however, by the side of the two quite startling mistranslations that reveal themselves in these few lines. One of them is in fact much worse than a mistranslation – it is a flagrant case of bowdlerization. No one reading the first sentence of the
Standard Edition
could possibly divine that in Freud's original the narcissist is said to stroke and caress and gaze at his own body
mit sexuellem Wohlgefallen
, ‘with sexual pleasure’: this oh-so-explicit phrase is quite simply – excised and thus another bit of Freud's characteristic oomph and colour is obliterated. Much more serious, however, is the garbled title: the wording ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ is a grave misrepresentation of Freud's heading
Zur Einführung des Narzissmus
, whichunarguably refers to the introduction of narcissism, and not to any kind of introduction to narcissism. This may conceivably have been ignorance on the part of the Standard Edition translators (they commonly misunderstand Freud's German) - but it is much more likely to have been a case of deliberate spin: Freud's choice of words clearly reflects the
newness
of his narcissism theory and a concomitant sense that it therefore needs a good deal of explaining; the
Standard Edition
(mis-)title, however, implies that the theory is soundly established, and that the novice reader is about to be introduced to it, rather as a first-year undergraduate might