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It came at a time when psychoanalysis still made headlines; a lost manuscript of Freud had just been recovered. In The Observer 26 July 1987, the heading was Id and the Ice Age. It was the well-known Freud scholar Ilse Grubrich-Simitis who made the discovery. As she sifted through an undisturbed trunk of Ferenczi’s papers, she came across a 12-page paper in Freud’s handwriting. And this discovery was indeed an historical event. For as Ilse Grubrich-Simitis started to read it she realized that it must be one of Freud’s lost papers on metapsychology.
We can imagine how Freud would have reacted. For this event really is comparable to the excavation of an antique object; and as we may remember, Freud admitted to being envious of Schliemann and how he had brought the treasures of Troy into the open. On the other hand, this was after all not a manuscript Freud intended to publish. In his letter to Ferenczi of 28 July 1915, into which this manuscript was included, Freud wrote: “You can throw it away or keep it”. The manuscript grew out of the close collaboration between the two, and to a large extent its major ideas bore the stamp of Ferenczi, as also comes forth in Freud’s remark.
In The New York Times 10 February 1987, the discovery was even rated front page news. Though the headline was less tabloid, Lost Paper Shows Freud’s Effort to Link Analysis and Evolution, the event was more or less presented as “alarming news”. For it was a “wildly speculative manuscript” that had been disclosed, and the reported reactions of several contemporary psychoanalysts bore witness to a widespread embarrassment. One way to fend it off was to question the overall role of metapsychology in Freud’s oeuvre. The whole situation prompted the well-known psychoanalyst Robert Holt, also a professor in psychology, to sing out: “Metapsychology is a mess”.
As is well known, Freud published five metapsychological papers. We know also that seven more papers were planned for publica