Two Prevalent Misconceptions about Freud's “Project” (1895)

There are two prevalent misconceptions about the “Project,” Freud's important first draft of a mental apparatus, which first came to light, in the sense of its publication in English, nearly sixty years after it was first drawn up in 1895 (Freud, 1887 1902). The one regards it as “ostensibly a neurological document” (Strachey, S.E. 1:290), the other as “disavowed by its creator” (p. 293). Since these judgments are to be found not only in the Standard Edition of The Origin of Psychoanalysis but in the original English version edited by Kris et al. (Freud, 1887 1902)1 the summary by Ernest Jones in The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud (1953)—actually the first official report of the Project in English—and in the early reviews by Erikson (1955), Bernfeld (1955), and Brierley (1967) (in her comments on the Standard Edition), it is not to be regarded as surprising that these opinions are now all-but-established doctrine.

In challenging such authority, the burden must rest on the challenger. Nevertheless, the task seems by no means insuperable, since we find the evidence is obvious: I) Freud, as we shall demonstrate, kept right on with the Project after he is supposed (for inaccurate reasons) to have disavowed it; and 2) the work was quite ostensibly a “psychology,” Freud's own code name as used repeatedly in his correspondence with Fliess, which included the Project.2 The distinction is important in that the neurological aspects