While English-speaking readers were the first to have access to a complete translation of Freud’s works, problems remained: apart from deviations like rendering Trieb as ‘instinct’, the Standard Edition was marked by tone distortion, medicalization or loss of idiomaticity. Freud himself insisted that terms like Es (Id or It) were above all common language expressions. Bettelheim and Lacan posited that a critique of translation was a prerequisite before serious work could be done on the texts of psychoanalysis. However, translation had been less a problem than a method for the young Freud, whose polyglotism, quite visible in his youthful correspondence, allowed him to work creatively with the effects of the unconscious by going from transference to translation. Today, new translations of Freud are following these hints and pay more attention to both the fluidity of his vocabulary and the specificity of his concepts.

Ninety-five percent or more of dreams are populated by the dreamer who interacts with two to four other characters, most of whom can be recognized as familiar characters in the dreamer’s immediate social network. Friendly interactions (typically verbal conversations) are found in about 40 percent of dreams, while aggressive social interactions occur in about 45 percent of dreams. In addition, mind-reading or inferring the mental states of others, particularly those characters the dreamer interacts with, occurs in over 80 percent of dreams. Finally, people who are most important in the dreamer’s waking network regularly appear in that dreamer’s dreams. Thus, existing data from dream content studies is certainly consistent with SST.