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(a) German Editions:
(1905 or 1906 Probable date of composition. )
1962 Neue Rundschau, 73, 53-57
(b) English Translation:
‘Psychopathic Characters on the Stage’ 1942 Psychoanal. Q., 11 (4), Oct., 459-464. (Tr. H. A. Bunker.)
The present translation is a new one by James Strachey.
Dr. Max Graf, in an article in the Psychoanal. Quart., 11, (1942), 465, relates that this paper was written by Freud in 1904 and presented to him by its author. It was never published by Freud himself. There must be some mistake about this date (the MS. itself is undated), for Hermann Bahr's play, Die Andere, which is discussed on p. 310, was first produced (in Munich and Leipzig) at the beginning of November, 1905, and had its first Vienna performance on the 25th of the same month. It was not published in book form till 1906. The probability is, therefore, that the present paper was written late in 1905 or early in 1906. Our thanks are due to Dr. Raymond Gosselin, editor of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, for supplying us with a photostat of Freud's original manuscript. The handwriting is in places difficult to decipher, which accounts for a few divergences between the two English translations.
[PEP] This page can be read in German in GESAMMELTE WERKE Vol 18S, Page 655
If, as has been assumed since the time of Aristotle, the purpose of drama is to arouse ‘terror and pity’1 and so ‘to purge the emotions’, we can describe that purpose in rather more detail by saying that it is a question of opening up sources of pleasure or enjoyment in our emotional life, just as, in the case of intellectual activity, joking or fun open up similar sources, many of which that activity had made inaccessible. In this connection the prime factor is unquestionably the process of getting rid of one's own emotions by ‘blowing off steam’; and the consequent enjoyment corresponds on the one hand to the relief produced by a th