Textual History
The Three Essays were 'submitted by their author, in the course of a succession of editions over a period of twenty years, to more modifications and additions than any other of his writings, with the exception of, perhaps, The Interpretation of Dreams '. Whereas 'in its first edition, the Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality was a small book of 80-odd pages, little more than a pamphlet...by 1925, when it had reached its sixth edition, the last to appear in Freud's lifetime, it had grown to 120 pages'.
Thus for readers of the final text it 'will probably come as a surprise to learn, for instance, that the entire sections on the sexual theories of children and on the pregenital organizations of the libido (both in the second essay) were only added in 1915, ten years after the book was first published'. Similarly, Freud's 'first explicit mention of the "castration complex"...of "envy for the penis"... of the actual term Oedipus complex' all postdate the first Three Essays of 1905.
As Freud himself conceded in 1923, the result was that 'it may often have happened that what was old and what was more recent did not admit of being merged into an entirely uncontradictory whole'. Thus whereas at first 'the accent was on a portrayal of the fundamental difference between the sexual life of children and of adults; later, the pregenital organizations of the libido made their way into the foreground, and also...the sexual researches of children; and from this we were able to recognize the far-reaching approximation of the final outcome of sexuality in children (in about the fifth year) to the definitive form taken by it in adults'.
He was still trying to make additional refinements to his theory even at that late date, however; and we may perhaps (if we wish) regard all such changes as further evidence of the way that 'Freud's thought is the most perennially open to revision...a thought in motion'. There are two English translations, one by A.A. Brill in 1910, another by James Strachey in 1949 published by Imago Publishing Strachey's translation is generally considered superior, including by Freud himself.
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