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(a) GERMAN EDITION:
1950 In Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse, edited by , and . London: Imago Publishing Co.
(b) ENGLISH TRANSLATION:
1954 In The Origins of Psycho-Analysis, edited as above. London: Imago Publishing Co.; New York: Basic Books. (Tr. Eric Mosbacher and James Strachey.)
The present translation, based on that of 1954, has been entirely revised.
The history of Freud's relations with Wilhelm Fliess (1858-1928) is fully narrated in Chapter XIII of the first volume of Ernest Jones's biography of Freud (1953) and in Ernst Kris's introduction to the books in the bibliography above. Here it is only necessary to explain that Fliess, a man two years younger than Freud, was a nose and throat specialist living in Berlin with whom Freud carried on a voluminous and intimate correspondence between 1887 and 1902. Fliess was a man of great ability, with very wide interests in general biology; but he pursued theories in that field which are regarded to-day as eccentric and quite untenable. He was, however, more accessible to Freud's ideas than any other contemporary. Freud accordingly communicated his thoughts to him with the utmost freedom and did so not only in his letters but in a series of papers (‘Drafts’ as they are called here) which presented organized accounts of his developing views and are in some cases first sketches of his later published works. The most important of these papers is the long one-some forty thousand words-to which we have given the title of Project for a Scientific Psychology. But the whole series, written as they were during the formative years of Freud's psycho-analytic theories culminating in The Interpretation of Dreams, deserve the closest study.
These papers, and even the fact of their existence, were totally unknown until the time of the Second World War.1 The