Preliminary Note

This publication was not originally conceived as a book. The two essays of which it consists were composed at different times.

I wrote the first piece, ‘The Primal Book of Psychoanalysis’, representing early Freud, for the centenary of the appearance of Breuer’s and Freud’s Studies on Hysteria. S.Fischer, the publishers of Freud’s works in Germany, brought out a reprint of the first edition to mark this anniversary in 1995 and my essay was intended as an accompanying commentary. An expanded version, on which the present translation is based, was printed in the December 1995 issue of the journal Psyche. A few notes on precursors of Breuer’s and Freud’s research were also finally added.

The essay on late Freud was in fact written previously. My research on Freud’s manuscripts included work on those of Moses and Monotheism. I put forward my gradually emerging hypotheses for the first time in the Sigmund Freud Lecture in Frankfurt in 1989. The revised and expanded version of ‘Freud’s Study of Moses as a Daydream’, from which the English translation was made, was published by Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag in 1994. The preface and parts of the preliminary note to this edition are, however, here incorporated in the introduction. A few minor additions to the five sections of the essay have also been made.

It was Elizabeth Bott Spillius, the General Editor of the New Library of Psychoanalysis, who thought of combining the two contributions in a single book with the title Early Freud and Late Freud, a formulation that is also hers. I am very grateful to her for this inspiring idea-for when I began to reflect on her suggestion, I realized to my surprise that there are actually more links between these two works than I had hitherto been aware of, as the following introduction is intended to show.

I wish to thank Philip Slotkin for deploying all his translation skills to confer upon my essays, as with previous writings of mine, an English form as precise as it is aesthetic.

Edwina Welha