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The ‘Critical Introduction’ was found among the personal papers of Wilhelm Fliess's son Robert at his death in 1970. Robert's widow Eleanor gave the manuscript to Jeffrey Masson, later editor of Freud's letters to Fliess, who sold the manuscript on March 22, 1983, at the Stargardt auction in Marburg to an unknown collector.3 The catalogue published facsimiles of the first page of the document and one of the hand drawings (see Figure 1). A critical edition of the original was published in Luzifer Amor in early 2012.4 This is the first English translation of the text.
The text does not seem to have been included amongst the collection of Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess. It seems rather that Freud gave Fliess the manuscript before their correspondence began, probably in October 1887, when Freud was offering a course in neuroanatomy to three physicians from abroad including Fliess. A few weeks later, Freud wrote to Fliess (Freud, , p. 4; letter of November 24, 1887):5 ‘I am occupied with writing three papers at the same time, one of which is on the anatomy of the brain. The publisher is willing to bring it out next autumn’ (cf. Menninger, 2011, 2012). The work, however, was never published.