The Significance of Freud's Earliest Discoveries1

The subject of this paper is a number of hitherto unpublished writings of Freud's which have unexpectedly come to light. They date from the years 1887 to 1902 and will shortly be available in German.3 An English edition is in preparation.

The material consists of 168 letters addressed to a single correspondent and of nineteen manuscripts, clinical notes and various drafts of papers, a few comprehensive essays and of one monograph. None of it was intended by the author for publication. The editors, however, felt that publication was warranted, since the material represents a record unique in the history of science. While it seems at first that we can learn little from the new material that could not have been gleaned from a careful scrutiny of Freud's already published work, a more detailed study indicates some change of perspective. In thinking of the early history of psycho-analysis, we usually follow Freud's own account, mainly The History of the Psycho-analytic Movement and the Autobiographical Study. These were written at a distance of twenty and thirty years respectively from the experiences on which our new sources report, and were written by the man who had succeeded. The writings on which I am here reporting are by a man engaged in a desperate struggle with a new field of science, with a hostile environment and with resistances within himself. In this lies the uniqueness of the record.

In what follows, no chronological report and no biographical essay is intended. I shall omit much that is generally known, and focus on three interrelated problems in the early history of psycho-analysis: on the relation of psychology to physiology in Freud's thought, on the circumstances that led to the discoveries concerning infantile sexuality, and on the meaning of metapsychology for the development of Freud's ideas.

The relation of psychology to physiology stands in the centre of the correspondence. Only Freud's side of it is extant. Its termination roughly coin