You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Freud published his first extended account of his views on psychological theory in the seventh chapter of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900a), which incorporated, in a transmuted form, much of the substance of his earlier, unpublished ‘Project’ (1950a [1895]). Apart from occasional short discussions, such as the one in Chapter VI of his book on jokes (1905c), ten years passed before he again began to enter deeply into theoretical problems. An exploratory paper on ‘The Two Principles of Mental Functioning’ (1911b) was followed by other more or less tentative approaches—in Part III of his Schreber analysis (1911c), in his English paper on the unconscious (1912g), and in the long discussion of narcissism (1914c). Finally, in the spring and summer of 1915, he once more undertook a full-length and systematic exposition of his psychological theories.
The five papers which follow form an interconnected series. As we learn from a footnote to the fourth of them (p. 222), they are part of a collection which Freud had originally planned to publish in book form under the title Zur Vorbereitung einer Meta-psychologie (Preliminaries to a Metapsychology).1 He adds that the intention of the series was to provide a stable theoretical foundation for psycho-analysis.
Though the first three of these papers were published in 1915 and the last two in 1917, we learn from Dr. Ernest Jones (1955, 208) that they were in fact all written in a period of some seven weeks between March 15 and May 4, 1915. We also learn from Dr. Jones (Standard Ed., 209) that seven more papers were added to the series during the following three months, the whole collection of twelve being completed by August 9. These further seven papers, however, were never published by Freud and it seems probable that at some later date he destroyed them,