Thursday, September 25, 2008

Freud

I spent the afternoon revising a translation of an article about the concept of "pleasure", according to Plato, Aristotle, Freud and Lacan. This puts me somewhat out of my depth, but of course all I have to do is make sure that the sentences aren't in translationese (which in Lacan's case is a bit of a tall order, but who said being a translator was going to be easy?). I understood enough to be surprised to learn that Freud wasn't quite as sex mad as he's made out in popular culture: he regarded the sex drive as a way of getting rid of urges that prevented people from having a quiet lie down. The quiet lie down is what really matters.

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