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It will not be possible for a complete critical edition of the Moses manuscripts to be brought out quickly. The following description is intended to give the reader an impression of the formations and stratifications, as well as of some of the fault-lines, to be found in the quarry mentioned at the beginning of this essay.
The manuscripts, which amount to just over 200 pages, are at present in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC (Sigmund Freud Collection). They were transferred to this final depository from London in the mid-1980s after the death of Anna Freud.
The Moses manuscripts can be grouped together in three bundles: the manuscript of the ‘historical novel’, that of the published version and that of the draft of parts of the third essay.
Although this book is not the place for a detailed discussion of the differences between the ‘historical novel’ and the printed version,2 a cursory characterization is appropriate here. What Freud preserved of the early version is by no means a completely different work from its printed successor that has long been familiar to us; the former’s pages in fact contain the fundamental ideas of the printed version—sometimes in rather different order—in which, however, they are developed more fully and, as it were, orchestrated more sumptuously; this applies particularly to the first and second essays and in some respects also to the first part of the third essay. In the transition from the early version to the book as later published, however, we cannot fail to see how the author progressively abandoned the loose, narrative ductus in favour of a more strenuously scientific style of