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This volume fully maintains the high level of its predecessors in the Standard Edition. Comparison of sample passages again suggests that the new translation is often very close to what Freud himself might have written had English been his mothertongue; previous translations tend to show less complete command both of the English and the German languages and not infrequently obscure essential meaning by too literal an adherence to the German text.
The heart of this volume is the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, the work that rates as of equal significance with The Interpretation of Dreams, and which Freud took similar pains to keep up-to-date. Like the new edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, this edition of the Three Essays indicates, with dates, every alteration of substance that has been introduced into the work since its first issue, cancelled passages and earlier versions being given as footnotes. In a 'Note' the editor gives an excellent summary of the development of sexual theory. The essential findings of the Essays themselves are, of course, condensed in Freud's own 'Summary'. An Appendix gives a 'List of Writings by Freud dealing predominantly or largely with Sexuality'.
The 'other works' include shorter, more or less contemporary (1905, 1906) papers on technique, therapy, and aetiology—all new translations. The translation of 'Psychical (or Mental) Treatment' is, so far as is known, the first to be published. As a footnote points out, this early paper contains one of those anticipations, so common in Freud's writings, of views only worked out much later, in this case a hint of a future psychology of love-relationships.
The German original of the last paper, 'Psychopathic Characters on the Stage', does not appear to have been published. The volume ends with a Bibliography, a List of Abbreviations, and a General Index.