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On July 28, 1915, Sigmund Freud sent a handwritten draft of an essay entitled “Overview of the Transference Neuroses” to his Hungarian student and colleague, Sandor Ferenczi. On the back of the last page, Freud wrote a brief letter which began: “Dear Friend, I am sending you herewith the draft of the xn [paper], which will certainly interest you” (cited in Grubrich-Simitis, 1987, p. xvi). The numeral “xn” refers to a series of twelve theoretical or metapsychological essays that Freud wrote in the first half of 1915. Freud repeatedly wrote to several colleagues detailing his progress as he worked to complete the collection of essays, and he declared that it was his intention to publish all twelve as a book entitled Introductory Papers on Metapsychology .
Freud never published the book, and only the first five of the series were published as journal articles, the first three in 1915, the following two in 1917. It has been widely assumed that Freud destroyed his copies of the remaining seven metapsychological essays which thus were lost to posterity (Jones, , p. 186; Schur, 1972, p. 34). Therefore, the discovery in 1983, of a draft of the unpublished twelfth essay, in a trunk which had belonged to Ferenczi (Grubrich-Simitis, 1987) makes it possible to consider new evidence concerning Freud's motivation and thinking during the time of the creation of the twelve essays.
On July 12, 1915, about two weeks before sending Ferenczi the draft of the twelfth paper, Freud sent him a letter in which he revealed the concepts he would develop in the essay (Jones, , p. 330).