When Karl Abraham wrote to Freud in 1924 that he had been delighted to obtain an antiquarian copy of Freud's first neurological publication, he noted that it was “very interesting to recognize your later style in this, your earliest paper.” Freud, in an oft-quoted reply (including at the outset of the present book), responded that it would be “making severe demands on the unity of the personality to try and make me identify myself with the author of the paper on the spinal ganglia of the petromyzon. Nevertheless I must be he, and I think I was happier about the discovery than about others since” (Freud-Abraham, 1966, pp. 368-369). In retrospect, the intriguing combination of distance and nostalgia conveyed by Freud's remark might be thought of as emblematic of a perspective on his early