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Sigmund Freud
Beyond the Pleasure Principle
Critical Edition by Ulrike May and Michael Schröter1
The text of Beyond the Pleasure Principle (BPP) published in this journal is a translation of the first critical edition2 of a major work by Freud, and only the second such publication overall,3 if one takes ‘critical’ to mean that every phase of the writing that can be differentiated has been taken into consideration, from the manuscript, where available, through various editions to its final published form and that all alterations to which the text has been subjected in its passage from inception to the last authorized version have been documented.
In this respect the new edition goes far beyond the work done sixty years ago by James Strachey for the English Standard Edition of Freud's work, which was taken over, in a more or less revised form, in the German Studienausgabe (see Grubrich-Simitis, 1996, pp. 51-54, 62-64).4