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This paper is an account of and a thoughtful comment on Freud's correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess between the years 1887 and 1902, as well as on nineteen of Freud's manuscripts, clinical notes, drafts of papers, several essays, and one monograph. Freud intended none of this material for publication. It has only recently come to light and has now been published in German.1
From the wealth of material Kris selects three interrelated problems: the relation of psychology to physiology in Freud's early thought, the circumstances that led to the discovery of infantile sexuality, and the meaning of metapsychology for the development of Freud's ideas. A brief biographical survey culminating in the publication of Studies in Hysteria in 1895 is given. In 1892 Freud gave up hypnosis for treatment and instead used it for exploration and thus arrived at the cathartic method. He formulated the law of constancy after having already introduced metapsychology as a concept. This concept anticipated a future hypothesis and appeared here in its earliest formulation, to be published only twenty years later in his official publication. The concept of quantity is introduced into psychic functioning and the concept of libido formulated. Its toxicological application—'Anxiety is generated by repressed libido'—was abandoned thirty years later. Freud and Fliess had both been trained in the doctrines of a physiology based on physics, that of Helmholtz and Du Bois-Reymond. Accordingly Freud attempted to organize into a system all his new discoveries in the light of brain physiology in a treatise which he first called Psychology For the Neurologist, draft after draft of which is mentioned in the correspondence. The book was never completed.
A new discovery intervened, for in 1895 he included the psychology of dreams into his research and suddenly the wishfulfilling tendencies of their latent content became evident to him. He embodied the main ideas of his Psychology For the Neurologi