The collected works

The other day I mentioned (at reference 1) an offer of the full Freud for a touch under $5 plus postage. This has now turned up and this is to report on the experience so far.

The first hurdle was finding, some weeks after the event, that the Windows 10 upgrade on my HP desktop had wiped out the disc drive, the one you shove CDs in that is. Not something that one needs to use very often these days. A long and helpful session with the BT help desk did not get it to work, but did run the problem down to HP not having gotten around to a new driver yet and did poke into life a large Windows 10 update, which had been sitting quietly in the background for a while, an update which will no doubt do good otherwise.

In the meantime I discovered that my HP laptop, upgraded to Windows 10 at about the same time, still had  a disc drive and could read the CD which had arrived from the US. To find that I had bought a 12Mb pdf file, a file containing  the 5,000 odd pages of the complete works of Freud.

A cursory check of Volume X of the standard edition, the one such volume that I do have, suggests that the CD has used the standard Strachey translation. But it is not a photograph, if for no other reason than that the line structure has changed, so someone must have scanned the thing in, a process which is likely to introduce errors, although I did not spot any. I wondered who paid for all this? You would need to sell a lot of CDs at $5 a pop to pay for all the scanning and editing which must have been involved. Do that many people still do Freud?

I found no proper introductory material about how the CD had been prepared or about the credentials of those doing the preparation. Maybe it is there, but I have yet to find it.

There are two ways of getting into your 5,000 pages, with one contents page organised chronologically and another organised alphabetically. Which is a lot better than some of the cheap collected works, which can be very clumsy in this regard, that one can buy for Amazon's kindle.

The editor's notes prefacing each of the two works - 'Little Hans' and the 'Rat Man' - in my edition have gone missing - and have not been replaced by anything else. Which is a pity, as such prefaces would have given one confidence in what followed.

Some, but not all of the footnotes in my edition have made it to the CD. Some appear to have been edited. Some of this may reflect the changes made over the various editions of the standard edition.

The CD might well be the collected works, but it does not preserve the arrangement of the standard edition.

Lastly, having read the CD from the US, I had enough information to find out that I could have downloaded the pdf for free, had I known where to look. A minor irritation. More important, the bibliophile said to be responsible for the CD remains, so far anyway, invisible. On the other hand, a chap doing Freud for his PhD was visible and was worrying about whether he could trust such a CD for such purposes. I guess the answer is up to a point: fine for reading, but if you want to use anything for real, best to check it in a real book.

For my more amateur purposes though, the pdf will be fine.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/the-full-freud.html.