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(a>) German Edition:
1893 Wien. med. Presse, 34 (4), 121-6 and (5), 165-7. (January 22 and 29.)
(b) English Translation:
‘On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena’ 1956 Int. J. Psycho-Anal., 37 (1), 8-13. (Tr. James Strachey.)
The German original seems never to have been reprinted. The present translation is a very slightly emended version of the one of 1956.
The German original is headed with the words ‘By Dr. Josef Breuer and Dr. Sigm. Freud of Vienna’. But this is in fact a shorthand report of a lecture delivered by Freud and revised by him. Though it deals with the same subject-matter (and often in similar terms) as the famous ‘Preliminary Communication’ (1893a), which has its proper place in the Standard Edition in Volume II at the beginning of Studies on Hysteria (1895d), this bears lecture every mark of being the sole work of Freud.
The Breuer and Freud ‘Preliminary Communication’ was published in a Berlin periodical, the Neurologisches Zentralblatt, in two instalments on January 1 and 15, 1893. (It was immediately afterwards reprinted in Vienna in the Wiener medizinische Blätter of January 19 and 26.) The lecture which is printed here was delivered by Freud at a meeting of the Vienna Medical Club on January 11—that is to say, before the second instalment of the ‘Preliminary Communication’ had been published.
What is perhaps the most noticeable thing about the lecture is the preponderance of the traumatic factor among the causes assigned for hysteria. This is, of course, a proof of the strength of Charcot's influence upon Freud's ideas. The shift over to a realization of the part played by ‘instinctual impulses’ still lay in the future.