(Accepted for publication 12 October 2015)

Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality is one of the grounding texts of 20th century European thinking. In it Freud develops a highly original theory of sexuality for which hysteria (and pathology in general) serves a model to understand human existence. Freud published this text five times during his lifetime. This article wants to reconstruct the first edition with regard to the status and nature of (infantile) sexuality in relation to its object. It investigates how and why this relation changes in the different versions of the text. The reconstruction of the first edition is a crucial, but often forgotten task to understand the genesis of Freudian thinking.