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This edition of Beyond the Pleasure Principle is the first edition of any work by Freud to include complete variants. Ulrike May and Michael Schröter reproduce the text in the Gesammelte Schriften , the last print supervised by Freud, and report variants from the first , second , and third editions, as well as from the pre-publication versions. In addition, they provide a diplomatic transcription of the first of these versions. To these scrupulously edited texts May has added a long, valuable essay on the genesis of Beyond the Pleasure Principle and proposes a new interpretation of this controversial work. Taken together, the edition and commentary represent a milestone in the study of Freud's methods of composition—a worthy successor to the pathbreaking book by Ilse Grubrich-Simitis (1993), in which she announced her discovery of the pre-publication versions in the Sigmund Freud Archives of the Library of Congress and discussed some of their essential features (pp. 234-244).
The first of these versions of Beyond the Pleasure Principle, probably written between the middle of March and the middle of April 1919, is an autograph fair copy with corrections. The second, composed between July 1919 and July 1920, is a typescript of the first with extensive additions and corrections in Freud's hand. The second version is forty percent longer than the first; it adds what is now chapter six (almost a third of the whole book) and several other important passages. In their edition, May and Schröter indicate when passages entered the