Presentation of the English Edition

The English translation presented here is that to be found in the Revised Standard Edition (RSE), a revision prepared by Mark Solms on behalf of the Institute of Psychoanalysis, London, of the translations in the Standard Edition (SE) under the general editorship of James Strachey. It therefore conforms to the changes being implemented in the RSE; the most salient in this text is the change in the translation of ‘Trieb’ (and its derivatives) from Strachey's ‘instinct’ to the RSE's ‘drive’. We are very grateful to Mark Solms and the Institute of Psychoanalysis for generously making this text available to us.

We have not included Strachey's editorial apparatus giving cross-references to connected or relevant passages in Freud's other writings within the SE. All of Strachey's strictly textual notes, however, regarding changes between editions, are incorporated in a different form through the colour coding employed in this edition. Where there are differences between the changes now visible through the editorial work of Schröter and May and those signalled by Strachey, the footnoting apparatus should indicate them. We also have included some of Strachey's notes which are clarificatory of the text (e.g. giving references and translations to literary quotations). In addition, we have included a small number of the additional notes prepared by Mark Solms for the RSE (for which, again, we are grateful).

In this English version of the critical edition of BPP prepared by May and Schröter (LA, 2013), the text is presented so that changes in the text may be readily seen. Colour coding allows easy identification of the first ‘fair copy’, prepared by Freud in 1919, the second ‘fair copy’ of 1920, in which Chapter VI is found for the first time, and subsequent changes in the first edition (1920), second edition (1921), third edition (1923) and the final text as published in the Gesammelte Schriften of 1925-34 (which was the German edition from which James Strachey prepared the trans