[RD] German speakers: i need help with some words for a translation

[Ryika]

Populärpsychology (the noun) is a term used to describe what is generally held to be true about human psychology. Because it's mostly based on "common sense", there are a lot of things that we generally think are true, but actually aren't, which is why it's usually a derogative term.

A person who gets called a Populärpsychologe does not necessarily have to be a layman, or an amateur though, it may as well just be a very knowledgeable psychologist who's drawing too many conclusions based on too little scientific evidence on a specific subject.

But in most cases yes, it's usually used as a dismissive term against people who think they know what they're talking about, but are actually just drawing conclusions based on what seems logical to them, or repeating things that are held to be true by society, with either no scientific evidence backing that position, or with scientific evidence going directly against it. If it's used as a general term, and not in response to a specific person, then it's very likely that that's what's meant.

 

[Kyriakos]

^Thanks
Any info on whether this would be also the meaning at the time Freud wrote this? (1919)

 

[Kyriakos]

The following is most likely the last one i will be needing help with - and i will try to refrain from accepting more translations of german, if i can help it

But it is a striking point, and the Penguin translation seems to either retain what Freud erroneously recalled, or have a serious mistake (i suspect it is the former case). Anyway, here is the text in question:

Aber in der Erzählung des Herodot vom Schatz des Rhampsenit läßt der Meisterdieb, den die Prinzessin bei der Hand festhalten will, ihr die abgehauene Hand seines Bruders zurück, und andere werden wahrscheinlich ebenso wie ich urteilen, daß dieser Zug keine unheimliche Wirkung hervorruft.

I want to ask if Freud specifically claims that the severed hand was cut from the (corpse of) the brother. This is important, cause while the Penguin english edition writes so, in fact the story that Freud refers to (Herodotus, Histories B', about the pharaoh Rhampsenitus) is precise in naming the severed hand as having been cut from some (random) person who was recently deceased, and NOT from his own brother (other stuff make such an assumption be really impossible to be true; namely: his brother died a while ago, his mother insisted he returns the corpse, and, lastly, the original greek text as already noted does not speak of the hand belonging to the corpse of the brother nor is it insinuating any such thing; it speaks of 'a person who had died recently').
So, what is your verdict on this?

 

[sophie]

"abgehauene Hand seines Bruders"

"the hacked-off hand of his brother"

 

[Kyriakos]

^If so, that would indeed be a mistake by Freud. I was mostly surprised that the english translator (an academic) or his associates at Penguin, did not pick it up and thus inserted some comment.

 

[sophie]

^If so, that would indeed be a mistake by Freud. I was mostly surprised that the english translator (an academic) or his associates at Penguin, did not pick it up and thus inserted some comment.

I mean, easily verifiable oversights like that aren't typically made by academics, nor indeed by a respectable publisher like Penguin. I imagine they probably had a particular reason for omitting the note, either because it's not pertinent to Freud's overall line of thought, or because it's a willful alteration on the part of Freud. Or because Freud himself was working from an erroneous translation in which it was the brother's hand. Regardless, the source text in Freud is rather unambiguous. The hand being snatched back is the hacked-off hand (in the English translation of the Herodotus story I check with it's an "arm", moreover) is that of the Thief's brother.

A possible and straightforward mistake is that the thief does cut off his brother's head. Could be that he erroneously assumed that he also cut off the arm after recovering the body (although he only recovers the body because he mother threatened to rat him out if he didn't bring the body back for burial), or that he made it the arm of the brother so as to simplify the story. The alteration doesn't really change the meat of the story very much; the arm's only role is to ensure that the thief could both embarrass the king, foil the trap, and escape with his life. Whose arm it is is entirely irrelevant aside from the fact that it isn't the thief's.

 

[Kyriakos]

^The main problem that makes this a little more than just a fleeting error, is that Freud uses the example to claim that in some stories the reader won't deem a cut-off hand as uncanny. Then he goes on to present how he himself enriches the potential for uncanniness by presenting a made-up and own (recalled falsely) version of Herodotus, where the cut hand was taken from one's own brother*
Anyway, i don't agree that, in either case, it would somehow be rightly deemed as below Penguin to include a note; in fact they include some notes on much less important things, such as how one of Freud's footnotes appears in different position in the first and the second edition of the german text (which very few readers would have anyway, or if they do it would likely be a reprint with no reference to an adjusted positioning of the very minor footnote there by Freud).
So, no, i certainly do view this as something which just was not picked up by Penguin. Obviously it isn't some huge mistake/omission on their part either, but ideally they should have identified it.

*there is, also, a hypothetical, but not that impossible to be true, case that Freud unwittingly substituted in his memory of the story he likely read a while ago, the actual severed head of the brother (his brother cut that off) with the supposed severed hand.

 

[Arent11]

I've checked that & I found both accounts that it was the hand of his brother & the hand of another person. Wikipedia for example states that it was the hand of the brother, but doesn't link to the original text/source, which is suspicious. Some other websites that apparently(!) contain the original text seem to mention that it was the hand of another person.

Maybe, there are different accounts of the same story?

 

[Kyriakos]

I've checked that & I found both accounts that it was the hand of his brother & the hand of another person. Wikipedia for example states that it was the hand of the brother, but doesn't link to the original text/source, which is suspicious. Some other websites that apparently(!) contain the original text seem to mention that it was the hand of another person.

Maybe, there are different accounts of the same story?

At any rate the Penguin edition of 2003 (it is available online) has the mistake by Freud, and so does the text of the original german that i am using (from Project Gutemberg).

If you mean Herodotus, though, then no, the story doesn't change [it would make no sense either to have the hand be cut from the brother; unless we had other stuff not in the story, eg the mother having died already, the hand being mummified (which wouldn't work as a decoy anyway) etc etc].