Chance and the Goblin Tricks of the Unconscious

Translator’s Note

Herbert Silberer (1882 to 1923), a Viennese writer on dreams, symbolism and the occult who belonged for some years to the circle around Freud, published this little book in 1921 as the third number of the Schriften zur Seelenkunde und Erziehungskunst, a popular series edited in Zurich by the pastor and analyst Oskar Pfister. It gathers seventy-five examples, from Silberer's own life, from friends, and from Freud, Jung, Adler, Stekel, Rank, Kammerer and Strindberg, of chances that are not chance: the ring lost on the way to a broken engagement, the name that will not come, the misread headline, the stone that turns into a beast when the scientist goes home. Silberer died by his own hand in January 1923 (English and German Wikipedia, "Herbert Silberer").

This translation is made from the page images of the Bern and Leipzig printing of 1921 (Ernst Bircher Verlag), the copy of the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin, scanned for the Internet Archive. The scan's text layer was used only as a first draft of the German; every page was read against its image and corrected. No other printing has been found. The publisher's advertisement printed after the list of literature is not part of Silberer's text and is left out.

The English keeps the book's parts in their order: the list of the series, the half-title, the series title, the title page, the contents, Pfister's foreword, and Silberer's four chapters and list of literature. Every heading is given in English and then in Silberer's German. His examples are numbered as he numbers them, 1 to 75, with 46a. Where a case turns on a German word, a pun, a slip, a misreading, a rhyme, the German is kept beside the English, because the argument runs on its letters; the translator's glosses are in parentheses. Where Silberer spaced out a word for emphasis, the English sets it in italics, as it does the names he spaced out. His dashes are given as commas, colons or parentheses. He quotes Freud, Jung, Kammerer, Schopenhauer and Strindberg in German; the English translates his German. The page numbers of the 1921 edition are not reproduced; the contents link to the parts of this edition, and the page references inside the examples are Silberer's own, to the books he cites.

The text is translated without modern commentary. A few notes, marked with a dagger and a roman numeral and gathered at the end, explain a pun, place a name or a quotation, or say what the original prints; each says where its information comes from.