Bettelheim makes level-headed and astute observations about errors in fundamental Freudian terms and thinking, and a persuasive case for the man and legacy he built that was founded more on a complex engagement with his own experience than an attempt to try to dictate or operationalize the working of the psyche.

In Freud and Man's Soul, Bruno Bettelheim argues cogently that Freud's translators have bastardized his texts by dropping the psychoanalyst's use of the word soul (Seele) in favor of a more technical, "professional" terminology. Mind is substituted for soul: "das seelischen Apparats" becomes "mental apparatus"; "die Wissenschaft vom Seelenleben" reads as "the science of mental life"; and "Psyche ist ein griechisches Wort und lautet in deutscher Übersetzung Seele" becomes, amazingly, "'Psyche' is a Greek word which may be translated 'mind.'" Bettelheim shows beyond doubt that Freud wanted and needed the emotional and historical resonances of 'Seele,' the secularized term he habitually used to denote the inmost essence of the human personality, including the spiritual and the passionate. Bettelheim is right to protest "the translators' ideologically motivated determination to eliminate the notion of the human soul from Freud's writings--a notion which is, after all, clearly enshrined in the very name "psychoanalysis". The single most vital word in the writings of our most influential psychologist--so deeply important for literary criticism--should not be "mind," but rather "soul."

Argues that mistranslation has distorted Freud's work in English and led students to see a system intended to cooperate flexibly with individual needs as a set of rigid rules to be applied by external authority.