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Students of Freud's writings have felt indebted to James Strachey for many years owing to the translations of Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, An Autobiographical Study, Freud's great case histories (translated in coöperation with Alix Strachey and published as Volume III of the Collected Papers) and a large number of previously untranslated articles of Freud, published mostly in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis during Strachey's editorship (1940–1945). Strachey's translations are distinguished by their impeccable rendering of Freud's meaning, and the ease and lucidity of style. They are based on a careful rethinking of the author's purpose. This has enabled Strachey to point occasionally to obscurities or contradictions in the original, hints gratefully acknowledged by Freud in footnotes added to the translations.
The present volume contains two kinds of contribution: first, papers published after 1925 (i.e., after the publication of Volume IV of the Collected Papers); this group includes also posthumously published but in part older papers; second, a selection of papers published before 1925, but for one reason or another not included in the previous volumes of the series. In both categories there are some papers never before translated, which make the present volume next to indispensable to students of Freud's writings.
The most important of these papers is without doubt Screen Memories, originally published in 1899. Freud restated his views on the subject on more than one occasion, particularly in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life. However, this first contribution has not been superseded by his later ones. While it is more tentative, it is more comprehensive than his later formulations, and on no other occasion has Freud stressed what might be considered the fundamentals of a general psychoanalytic theory of memory more clearly: using current terminology we might say that Freud presents the view that basic functions of memory, p