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(a) German Editions:
(1923 Date of Composition)
1928 Kurzer Abriss Der Psychoanalyse G.S., 11, 183-200.
1940 Kurzer Abriss Der Psychoanalyse G.W., 13, 403-27.
(b) English Translation:
‘Psychoanalysis: Exploring the Hidden Recesses of the Mind’ 1924 In These Eventful Years: The Twentieth Century in the Making, as Told by Many of its Makers, Vol. II, Chap. LXXIII, 511-23, London and New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica Publishing Co. (Tr. A. A. Brill.)
The present translation, with a changed title, is a new one by James Strachey.
We learn from Ernest Jones (1957, 114) that this was written by Freud, at the request of the American publishers, in October and November, 1923. This work is to be distinguished from the article written some two years later for the Encyclopaedia Britannica itself (1926f). The original German text, with a less exciting title than the American one, was published for the first time in 1928.
Psycho-analysis may be said to have been born with the twentieth century; for the publication in which it emerged before the world as something new—my Interpretation of Dreams—bears the date ‘1900’.1 But, as may well be supposed, it did not drop from the skies ready-made. It had its starting-point in older ideas, which it developed further; it sprang from earlier suggestions, which it elaborated. Any history of it must therefore begin with an account of the influences which determined its origin and should not overlook the times and circumstances that preceded its creation.
Psycho-analysis grew up in a narrowly-restricted field. At the outset, it had only a single aim—that of understanding something of the nature of what were known as the ‘functional’ nervous diseases, with a view to overcoming the impotence which had so far characterized their medical treatment. The neurologists of that period had been brought up to have a high respect for chemico-physical and pathologico-anatomical facts; and they wer