Complete Writings of Sigmund Freud. Critical Edition. Part 1

The goal of this project is to provide a constitutive and substantial contribution to the first historical-critical edition of Sigmund Freuds complete writings, encompassing, alongside his psychoanalytical texts, his early works, his preserved manuscripts and his entire correspondence. Given that Freud shaped twentieth-century Western culture like few others, such an edition is a major desideratum not only for specialists focusing on psychoanalysis but also for scholars undertaking research in the most varied fields of science. Having won the Goethe Prize in 1930, Freud also ranks among the great writers in the German language, so that such an edition would simultaneously make available a significant oeuvre of German prose. The envisioned project will generate specific outputs, which can stand in its own right, while also moving the historical critical edition in its entirety forwards. The choice of the digital medium for this critical edition will facilitate not only the publication of Freuds writings, both in the form of images of the originals and in the form of precise transcriptions. By allowing us literally to visualize how Freuds various writings are inter- connected, and how Freud refined texts over time, users will be able to gain a much more profound sense of the development of Freuds thought. A generation of senior Freud scholars, historians of science, philologists and editors with relevant expertise are currently still in a position to pass on their knowledge to a new generation and after extensive preparatory work, undertaken by an interdisciplinary team since 2012 to identify and evaluate the relevant source material and to confirm the projects viability, a concept as a whole, the philological principles and a relevant database covering Freuds works and letters have already been established. Our work so far has generated a strong basis for the realization of this project in hand: It will facilitate the creation of a systematic, comprehensive and searchable inventory and bibliography of Freuds complete works and correspondence. The historical editions of the printed works and the autographs of the majority of the known letters and manuscripts will be presented as facsimiles. In collaboration with the Austrian Centre for Digital Humanities of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the digital tools for the critical apparatus and the workflows will be developed. A substantial part of the complete writings, including a number of previously unpublished texts and letters, will be published according to the criteria of a historical-critical edition. A state-of-the-art critical edition of Freuds complete writings would also pay tribute to a scientist and writer who, towards the end of his life, had to flee from his home country, and whose books were publicly burnt.

The FWF project "Sigmund Freud. Historical-Critical Edition, Part 1" was planned as the first of several phases, which indicates a long-term, forward-looking conception and development of the entire edition project. Part 1 was designed as a pilot phase in which the workflow was to be conceived, adapted and established in order to place future editing work on a stable foundation. The anchoring of edition guidelines (for digital and analogue/printed editions), the determination of the depth of indexing of the commentary and, above all, the technical aspects in the implementation of the projects were important goals of this pilot phase. These were completely achieved. At the same time a historical-critical edition of Sigmund Freud`s works was an extremely ambitious undertaking from the very beginning: The enormous size of the text corpus (all texts between 1900 and 1905; 1920 and 1923) already shows how high the standards were set. Presentable results in the sense of publishable texts are examples for the further historical-critical edition of Freud`s works, which can be accessed via an interface to the repository, where all edited texts in all editing stages are located. In addition, a comprehensive text corpus of Freud`s works was compiled as a basis for further processing in subsequent project phases. The far greater challenges - as became apparent after the first year - lay in the differing views of the participating representatives from the disciplines of philology and psychoanalysis on how a historical-critical edition should be conceived and implemented. The scholarly conflict developed into a power struggle in which the website freud-edition.net, which had been brought into the project by the psychoanalytic project partners as a basis for work, was used as a means of exerting pressure, which severely impaired the philological work process. E.g. the site was repeatedly restricted and blocked without warning. Since the project was massively hindered by these measures and conflicts from May 2022 onwards, the presentable textual evidence of historical-critical editions are primarily samples that could nevertheless be compiled despite the hindrances. They prove that the developed workflow works and, above all, meets the required standards (long-term archiving, TEI encoding, permeability of the data and unrestricted open access). A considerable part of the material produced, and thus of the results, comprises the quantitatively salient OCR transcription corrections, which constitute the most important preliminary work to subsequently enter the automatic collation and manual coding process. Despite the conflicts that have arisen, all participants agree that a historical-critical Freud edition is still a major desideratum. Nevertheless, phase 1 has clearly shown that not only the editing of the texts, but also the resolution of conflicts of interest between the project partners will pose the greatest challenge for future work.