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(a) French Editions:
1896 Rev. neurol., 4 (6), 161-9. (March 30.)
1906 S.K.S.N., 1, 135-48. (1911, 2nd ed.; 1920, 3rd ed.; 1922, 4th ed.)
1925 G.S., 1, 388-403.
(b) English Translation:
‘Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses’
1924 C.P. 1, 138-154. (Tr. M. Meyer.)
Included (No. XXXVII) in Freud's own collection of abstracts of his early works (1897b). The original is in French. The present translation is a new one by James Strachey.
This paper and the next one, the second on the neuropsychoses of defence (1896), were sent off to their respective publishers on the same day, February 5, 1896, as Freud reported to Fliess in a letter the day after (Freud, 1950a, Letter 40). The French paper was published at the end of March, some six weeks before the other, and it consequently has priority over it for the first published appearance of the word ‘psycho-analysis’ (p. 151). The paper is a summary of Freud's contemporary views on the aetiology of all four of what he then regarded as the main types of neurosis: the two ‘psychoneuroses’, hysteria and obsessional neurosis, and the two ‘actual neuroses’ (as they were later to be called, see footnote 1, p. 279 below), neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis. The earlier part of the paper is to a great extent a repetition of the discussion on aetiology in the second paper on anxiety neurosis (1895f), while the later part covers very shortly the same ground as its contemporary, the second paper on the neuro-psychoses of defence (1896b). The reader may therefore be referred to these and to the editorial comments on them for further information.