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IN LONDON, IN 1983, A HITHERTO UNKNOWN MANUSCRIPT FROM FREUD'S pen was discovered among papers in Sándor Ferenczi's literary estate. It proved to be the draft of the twelfth metapsychological essay of 1915, an "Overview of the Transference Neuroses." The German edition, with a facsimile, was published in 1985; the English language version two years later.
On July 28, 1915, Freud had sent the manuscript to his friend and colleague Sándor Ferenczi, for his opinion. In the accompanying letter he left it up to him to throw the draft away subsequently or keep it as he wished. In the same letter Freud emphasizes that the fair copy follows the draft "sentence for sentence, deviating from it only slightly" (Freud, 1985a, p. xvi). With the newly discovered manuscript we thus acquire, for the first time, detailed information about the twelfth metapsychological essay—the keystone in that major theoretical structure that Freud had created during World War I as a series of twelve interconnected metapsychological papers. Originally he had intended to publish the collection in book form after the war, under the title Preliminaries to a Metapsychology (Zur Vorbereitung einer Metapsychologie), but as he later declared: "The attempt remained no more than a torso; …