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The three condensed memoranda which follow were included among the posthumous writings of Freud in Volume XVII of the Gesammelte Werke. (More detailed bibliographical data are attached to each separate draft below.) We are informed by the editors of the German edition that all three of these papers had been in Breuer's possession but were returned by him to Freud in 1909, the year after the publication of the second edition of Studies on Hysteria. Freud acknowledged their receipt in a letter dated October 8, 1909: ‘Very many thanks for letting me have the old drafts and sketches, which seem to me most interesting. As regards the notes on hysterical attacks [Sketch C below], it must be as you say; but I did not keep the manuscript after it was printed.’
Though the second of these sketches is undated, there can be no doubt that all three of them were written in the latter part of 1892, in preparation for the ‘Preliminary Communication’- ‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’ (1893a), Standard Ed., 2, 3. That work, produced in collaboration with Josef Breuer, was published on January 1 and 15, 1893.
Much of these sketches is in a highly condensed form, but it is possible to discover almost every single element of them, more intelligibly stated, in the ‘Preliminary Communication’. There is, however, one remarkable exception. The ‘principle of constancy’ is stated very clearly, and perhaps for the first time, in Section 5 of Sketch C (pp. 153-4); but it is entirely omitted, for some unexplained reason, in the ‘Preliminary Communication’. A full account of the history of the ‘principle of constancy’ is given in an Editor's Appendix on ‘Freud's Fundamental Hypotheses’ in Standard Ed., 3, 64-5.