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It is striking to note that the first edition of Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, hailed by James Strachey as “beside his Interpretation of Dreams … his most momentous and original contribution to human knowledge,” according to the blurb on the front cover of the new edition, was not published until 2016 (Freud, 1905/2016). This is particularly striking because, besides being one of the central texts by the founder of psychoanalysis, the content of this work changed radically until its final edition and fourth revision, published in 1924, which is “twice as long as the original one, and … contains theoretical insights that bluntly contradict Freud's original positions of 1905,” as the editors note in their forward to this edition (Freud, 1905/2016, p. vii). They further note that the first edition was never published in any language other than the original German. It is clear, from what the editors describe, that much of what we think of as the groundwork for Freudian theory was only added later. The Three Essays, as most of us learned them, have been largely alienated from their original context. It is true that the footnotes to the Standard Edition detail all Freud's revisions, but the foundational shifts that are behind these revisions have been rarely, until now, the focus of significant concern.
At times, reading the first edition and the editors' introduction, I had the sense that this text had been largely repressed, whether by Freud or by his followers: Freud does not even mention Oedipus in his original text; further, he develops his theory of sexuality without reference to an object, being entirely focused on what is stimulating to the infant. This is entirely in contrast to what was taught about sexuality in my own analytic training, even though, as the editors note, contradictory arguments are left in place throughout the later editions. In drawing attention to these details, however, Van Haute and Westerink ar