Vicissitudes

So I realized in class I never really understood what the heck "vicissitude" meant in Freud, and I wanted to get a little background. And because I realized this with our consideration of the mention of "the vicissitude of the idea as distinct from that of the affect" in the 1927 paper on fetishism, I thought I'd try and work out the use of the word in that sentence--which, as I'll say again in a moment, I found particularly odd because the word appeared apart from any mention of the drives or instincts, as if "vicissitude" meant something almost apart from being only, in Freud, the vicissitude of an instinct.
So, the word for "vicissitude" is "das Shicksal," which is a very complicated word in German, usually meaning something like "destiny" or "destination" or "fate," as in "It was the fate of my Saturday to be spent looking up this word in Freud." It can even mean "luck," as in "It's just my luck that..." What we mean here by "luck" or "fate" is something like "how things have ended up," or, better (since it implies more direction, selection, the fact that what happens is one of many possible outcomes) "how things went."
The English word "vicissitude" is relatively obscure in comparison, and the effort of translation here resembles what happened when Strachey and Jones and others famously decided upon "cathexis" (a made up "Greek" word) for "Besetzung" (which means something simple like investment)--in other words, James Strachey's (and Cecil Baines', I think) choice of "vicissitude" appears as a sort of making technical of a word that, in German, works on a lower register.
This doesn't necessarily mean "vicissitude" was a bad choice though, as some people are usually quick to think: "vicissitude" carries a lot of similar meanings as the more abstract uses of the German term. Looking at some dictionaries (OED, Webster), I see most often something like "a fluctuation of state or condition," as in the phrase "The vicissitudes of daily life." But, coming from the Latin vicis (change), the word lacks that sort of fatedness that Shicksal has with it. Thus it has been proposed that the last part of the title "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" ("Triebe und Treibshicksale") should be retranslated as "and their Fate."
However, before we just go ahead and do this (as if this alone would solve the problem), we have to note that "vicissitude" does have a certain sense that corresponds to the way that Freud thinks the instincts or drives are working. For all vicissitudes are vicissitudes of instincts, though--strangely--that only remains implied the essay on fetishism. All that is talked about is the vicissitude. This is because (I gather) Freud doesn't think he has to recall a very basic point about repression--that repression deals with instincts.
We can see all this if I recall fully the sentence under consideration in class:

If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the vicissitude of the idea as distinct from that of the affect, and reserve the word 'Verdrängung' ['repression'] for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be 'Verleugnung' ['disavowal'].

In German this is the following:

Will man in ihm das Shicksal der Vorstellung von dem des Affekts schärfer trennen, den Ausdruck "Verdrängung" für den Affekt reservieren, so wäre für das Shicksal der Vorstellung "Verleugnung" die richtige deutsche Bezeichnung.

To return to the question of what "vicissitude" means, and how the word "vicissitude" gets at what Freud is doing here with "das Shicksal:" the picture I get from the rest of Freud is that a vicissitude is a "function" of an instinct--this is how Freud in "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" introduces sublimation, for example. That is, the vicissitude is, precisely, "the fluctuation of a state of condition of the instinct." And this is what is going on here, it seems: Freud is saying that if we want to talk about the particular fluctuation in the state of condition of the instinct that is ideational, as distinct from that fluctuation that is affective, well, we should talk about "disavowal" instead of "repression." So though "vicissitude" is a bit more awkward than "das Shicksal," it is more precise than that German word--which can mean so many things--because it has a particular connotation that is closer to what Freud is getting at concerning instincts.
This is usually the case with Strachey: he chooses a word that will bring out, not the various connotations of the German, but the function of what the German signifies. In short, he reads Freud to look at how his view of the mind is working, and then chooses words to bring out how this work proceeds. This makes him a very detailed and reflective reader of Freud, but ultimately a bit of a problematic translator--whose task is also, with theoretical writing, to bring out a bit of the wording of the source text, its particular way of articulating its ideas. As you can see from all his introductions in the Standard Edition, what is not at issue, usually, is his word choice, but how the concept functions. It is as if the English word chosen doesn't matter, because we'll learn how to regard it in a particular technical sense. This is more what I mean when I say Strachey makes Freud technical. Suddenly words like "vicissitude" carry their own weight, become more reified (again like "cathexis"), and we lose their ability to just take place casually in the context of the sentence (which is how Freud, as well as most German medical language, loves to let them signify).
The problem is that there is a tension between the use of the word in the context here and what the sentence is doing, which is classifying. That is, the word "vicissitude" is used actually to classify something as "disavowal" rather than "repression." This makes things really complicated when we look at how "vicissitude" is working, because it's not just occurring to describe what is going on, but is also doing some work on its own for the other words in the sentence.
I can maybe get a little more precise about this problem, though, by looking closer inside "Instincts and Their Vicissitudes" and the essay "Repression." In the first essay Freud states that there are four generally discernible vicissitudes for instincts. These vicissitudes are like subspecies of the two general "types" of instincts (under the libido-theory, which gets changed later) which are the sexual-instincts and the preservative- or ego-instincts:

The reversal of an instinct into its opposite
The turning round of the instinct upon the subject's own self
Repression of an instinct
Sublimation of an instinct

Note that repression is itself just a vicissitude. Doesn't this conflict with the task in the essay on fetishism, which talks about a vicissitude within repression, as it were--that is, a vicissitude of a vicissitude? How can that be? Look again at the text:

If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the vicissitude of the idea as distinct from that of the affect, and reserve the word 'Verdrängung' ['repression'] for the affect, then the correct German word for the vicissitude of the idea would be 'Verleugnung' ['disavowal'].

Perhaps, however, Freud just talking about the particular way something in the repression "ends up"--that is, using the word "das Shicksal" more in context and not in a technical way, so that we should really regard this passage as saying the following:

If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the fate of the idea as distinct from that of the affect, and reserve the word 'Verdrängung' ['repression'] for the affect, then the correct German word for the fate of the idea would be 'Verleugnung' ['disavowal'].

We now see the problem more clearly: either we take the word in its more technical sense or take it in this other sense, which, frankly, makes things clearer. So we are led to ask, couldn't this problem, then, just be solved by rendering the passage in this new way? "Vicissitude" could thereby be retained as only relating to instincts, not to the distinct parts of the instinct (affect and idea).
The answer to this question is no. If we rendered the passage this new way, this would merely dodge what we have to address, because for Freud "das Shicksal" is also used in this confusing way (as applying to what is already a vicissitude) in the essay "Repression," and precisely to define the parts of the instinct:

Repression acts, therefore, in a highly individual manner. Each single derivative of the repressed may have its own special vicissitude...

Freud is talking about the (primal) repression of the instincts. He is saying that in the unconscious ideational formation that instincts bring about (their setting up of ideational associations--or "derivatives"--which later draw certain other thoughts towards a need for secondary repression) each idea associated with the instinct has its own vicissitude. What this means is that "vicissitudes" are also just the other repressed aspects of the vicissitude that is the repressed. (It is telling that in this instance Baines, the original translator of "Instincts..." just used "have its own special fate" to avoid this problem altogether.)
So, it seems like "vicissitude" is used in two ways, and can vary its sense depending on your point of view. Either the vicissitude is just the vicissitude of an instinct, or it is the vicissitude of a vicissitude. That is, in our language that we used above, the vicissitude of the instinct is something like its function, then, but it is also something like the minor twists and turns of that function itself which makes it a function. Freud's use of the same word in both cases, though, hints that whether you are talking about the parts of the vicissitude (its derivations or associations--that is, its affective associations or its ideational associations) or the vicissitude of the instinct itself (repression, sublimation, etc.), both operate like a function of the instinct, its particular "fate" or "how it ends up." Thus the use of the word in the more consistent manner of Strachey (as opposed to Baines, who uses two words depending on the case), is actually more justified, though it could cause confusion.
In the end, it seems that adopting "fate" (or, what I like, "how it went")--but only if it were done uniformly--would help out. That is, what has to be done is two things simultaneously: we have to regard "das Shicksal" as something more plain, but we also have to do this by making its use less dependent on context. Strachey tried to do this with "vicissitude," but it lost all connection to the German original. "Fate" has the virtue of allowing both these moves--it is just vague enough to be used uniformly without forgoing its connotations. Thus, in this instance in "Fetishism," we are talking about the derivative of the fate of the instinct, which is itself a fate of the instinct: its affective association and its ideational association:

If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between the fate of the idea as distinct from that of the affect, and reserve the word 'Verdrängung' ['repression'] for the affect, then the correct German word for the fate of the idea would be 'Verleugnung' ['disavowal'].

(Or, to indulge myself, I'll throw all sorts of other ways of putting it in: If we wanted to differentiate more sharply between how the idea went as distinct from how the affect ended up, and reserve the word 'Verdrängung' ['repression'] for the twists and turns of the affect, then the correct German word for how the idea went would be 'Verleugnung' ['disavowal'].)

What we're saying here, then, is that the fate of the fate of the instinct that is ideational is disavowed, not repressed--and that this disavowal is the mechanism of fetishism. Thus we can see how fetishism is like repression but also not like it: it operates as a fate on one of the fates of the instinct, repression. The mechanism of fetishism takes up repression and only concerns itself with one fate of this, and thus brings it away from repression proper, which really just concerns itself with the repression of the affect.