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It is known that Freud recorded significant events during three periods of his life. The first of these records is the Secret chronicle (Geheime Chronik). It is a “combination of diary and confession” and was begun in January 1883 as a joint project between Freud and his fiancé Martha Bernays while they were both living in Vienna. However, one year later, this diary-project was interrupted. Martha had at that time returned to Hamburg and Freud complained in a letter to her that “one of them” had not followed up the diary. The second project was in progress during the period of 1916-1918, but was of a significantly different nature. This time, Freud only noted down keywords about events that he wished to register. For this, he employed the mass-produced Prochaskas Familien-Kalender. The last project of this kind was given the name of the Shortest chronicle (Kürzeste Chronik) by Freud himself, and this chronicle covered the last decade of his life. As foreshadowed by the title, Freud imagined this project to be a very brief one. When Freud was given the diagnosis of cancer of the jaw in 1923, he was told that he had only 5 more years to live. When he started the diary in 1929, this time-limit had already been exceeded.
In Ernest Jones' three-volume biography (1957-1959), as well as in later biographies, such as Clark's Freud: the man and the cause (1980) and Gay's Freud: a life for our time (1988), the diary is barely mentioned as a phenomenon and its contents are not referred to. The contents of the diary have now been published and analysed for the first time. There are several reasons why this authentic Freud-document has been overlooked. It is not a diary in the usual sense of the word, but a recording of events with the use of key words. It was only after Anna Freud's death in 1982, when the