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The greater part of this volume consists of papers published some thirty years ago, and for this reason it runs the risk of being read less carefully than the others on the supposition that later advances have rendered this early work out of date and unimportant.
It is therefore necessary to point out, especially to fresh readers, that, in the case of Freud's early work, to act on this supposition is to risk losing what no amount of industrious application to his later work can replace.
The grouping of these early papers with his history of the psychoanalytical movement provides an ideal approach to the subject for fresh students, by revealing in the papers themselves Freud's first tentative explorations of unknown territory which he has since mapped out with ever increasing confidence and thoroughness, while the History throws interesting and valuable light on the circumstances under which these early papers were written.
Some critics have complained of the absence of any adequate systematic exposition of psycho-analytical theory, but even if such a formidable work existed serious students could not be absolved from the task of following the historical development of the science in a way rendered possible by the present collection of papers.
In the first paper, an appreciation of Charcot and his work, Freud, as it were, takes leave of certain clinical traditions on which he was nourished as a student, making handsome acknowledgment of them in the person of his famous teacher, but the paper is of more than historical interest, for his discussion of Charcot's views on hysteria gives us the first interesting glimpse of that characteristic attitude of mind to such problems which was to inaugurate a fresh tradition in psycho-pathology. With the second paper, on the psychical mechanism of hysterical phenomena, we come to a preliminary stage in the evolution of the Theory and Practice of Psychoanalysis, about which two interesting historical points are to be noted.
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