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I began the preface to this book with the statement that as of this writing, psychoanalysis is approximately 100 years old. James Strachey traced the origin of the word itself to that same time in the mid-1890s. In his introductory note to Freud's “Heredity and the Aetiology of the Neuroses” (1896a), he stated:
This paper [published first in French] and the next one, the second on the neuropsychoses of defence (1896b), were sent off to their respective publishers on the same day, February 5, 1896, as Freud reported to Fliess in a letter the day after (, Letter 40 [Masson, 1985, p. 170]). The French paper was published at the end of March, some six weeks before the other, and it consequently has priority over it for the first published appearance of the word “psycho-analysis” (p. 151) [p. 142].
The quotation from that paper reads as follows:
As regards the second class of major neuroses, hysteria and obsessional neurosis, the solution of the aetiological problem is of surprising simplicity and uniformity. I owe my results to a new method of psycho-analysis, Josef Breuer's exploratory procedure; it is a little intricate, but it is irreplaceable, so fertile has it shown itself to be in throwing light upon the obscure paths of unconscious ideation [Freud, 1896a, p. 151].
Strachey had even more assiduously traced the precursor designation to a point actually three years earlier. In the paper “The Neuro-Psychoses