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(a) GERMAN EDITION:
(1886 Date of composition.)
1960 In J. and R. Gicklhorn's Sigmund Freuds akademische Laufbahn im Lichte der Dokumente, 82, Vienna.
(b) ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
‘Report on my Studies in Paris and Berlin’ 1956 Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 37 (1), 2-7. (Tr. James Strachey.)
The present translation is a slightly corrected reprint of the one published in 1956.
The Report with which the Standard Edition of Freud's Psychological Works appropriately opens is a contemporary account by its protagonist of a historic event: the diversion of Freud's scientific interests from neurology to psychology.
The circumstances in which Freud obtained a travelling bursary from Vienna University in 1885 are related in detail by Ernest Jones (1953, 82-4). The grant, which was for 600 florins (worth at that time something under £50 or $250) and intended to cover a period of six months, was allotted by the College of Professors in the Faculty of Medicine; and to them he was expected to make a formal report on his return to Vienna. He spent about ten days in writing it almost immediately after his arrival back, and had finished it on April 22, 1886. (, Standard Edition, 252.) On the initiative of Siegfried Bernfeld, this report was unearthed in the University Archives by Professor Josef Gicklhorn, and it became possible to publish it-in English first-seventy years after it was written, through the kindness of Dr. K. R. Eissler, Secretary of the Sigmund Freud Archives in New York. The original, which remains in the Archives of the University of Vienna, consists of twelve manuscript sheets, of which the first contains only the title.
The high importance which Freud himself always attributed to his studies under Charcot is a matter of common knowledge.
This report marks his experience at the Salpêtriére with the utmost clarity as a turning point. When he arrived in Paris, his ‘chosen concern’ was with the anatomy of the nervous system; when he left, his mind was fi