A Chronology of Freud's Writing His Psychological Works

In a previous study I determined the frequency with which freud used the terms father and mother in his psychological works written in the years 1886-1939 (Mahl, 1985). These years span the period from the date of his earliest writing in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Strachey, 1953-1974) to his death. The achievement of those research goals concerning Freud's usage of father and mother required my assistant and me to determine the chronology of Freud's production of his works and the number of pages in each work. It was also necessary to determine the frequency of father and mother in each work. This we derived from the father-mother entries in the Concordance to the Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Guttman, Jones, and Parrish, 1980). From these classes of basic data I was able to portray the density of usage of father and mother throughout Freud's scientific career as a psychologist (density = n father (mother)/n pages), and I was able to show the impact of his own father's death and his self-analysis in the late 1890s and of his mother's death in 1930 on those indices. As an ancillary finding I portrayed Freud's yearly creation of the pages of the Standard Edition (see Figure 1). I refer the reader to my report (Mahl, 1985) for relevant details and a discussion of them.

The purpose of this chapter is to present the chronology of Freud's works and the number of pages they contain, thus providing background information for the interested reader of my previous report. In addition, I make available bibliographic source material not presented elsewhere.