In German language
The Three Essays underwent a series of rewritings and additions over a twenty-year succession of editions[11]—changes which expanded its size by one half, from 80 to 120 pages.[12] The sections on the sexual theories of children and on pregenitality only appeared in 1915, for example,[13] while such central terms as castration complex or penis envy were also later additions.[14]
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",[15] so that, whereas at first "the accent was on a portrayal of the fundamental difference between the sexual life of children and of adults", subsequently "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".[15]
Jacques Lacan considered such a process of change as evidence of the way that "Freud's thought is the most perennially open to revision...a thought in motion".[16]
Translations
There are three English translations, one by A.A. Brill in 1910, another by James Strachey in 1949 published by Imago Publishing.[17] Strachey's translation is generally considered superior, including by Freud himself.[18] The third translation, by Ulrike Kistner, was published by Verso Books in 2017. Kistner's translation is at the time of its publishing the only English translation available of the earlier 1905 edition of the Essays. The 1905 edition theorizes an autoerotic theory of sexual development, without recourse to the Oedipal complex.[19][20]
