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With this first paper on the neuro-psychoses of defence Freud gave public expression, if not directly, at least by implication, to many of the most fundamental of the theoretical notions on which all his later work rested. It will be recalled that the paper was written in January, 1894—a year after the publication of the ‘Preliminary Communication’ and a year before the completion of the main portion of the Studies on Hysteria and of Breuer's theoretical contribution to that volume. At the time of writing this paper, therefore, Freud was deeply involved in his first series of psychological investigations. From these a number of clinical inferences were beginning to emerge, and behind them some more general hypotheses which would lend coherence to the clinical findings. But it was not for another six months after the publication of Studies on Hysteria—in the autumn of 1895—that Freud made a first attempt at a systematic exposition of his theoretical views; and that attempt (the ‘Project for a Scientific Psychology’) was left uncompleted and unpublished by its author. It first saw the light of day in 1950, more than half a century later. In the meantime the curious student of Freud's theoretical views had to pick up what he could from the discontinuous and sometimes obscure accounts given by Freud at various later points in his career. Moreover, his one extended discussion of his theories in later years—the metapsychological papers of 1915—have survived only in a truncated form: seven of the twelve papers having completely disappeared.1
In his ‘History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement’ (1914d) Freud declared that ‘the theory of repression’, or defence, to give it its alternative name, ‘is the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests’ (Standard Ed., 14, 16). The term ‘defence’ actually occurs for the first time in the