The book records the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, linking it to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo and noting the heavy losses suffered by Austrian troops, especially on the Russian and Italian fronts. In the surrounding account of Freud’s work, the war also supplies a dividing line: the manuscripts of The Interpretation of Dreams and most of Freud’s other writings from before the war are lost, leaving later readers to reconstruct the development of his thought from published editions and dated editorial additions.

Assassination and Outbreak

The chronology places the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, at Sarajevo in 1914, followed by the outbreak of the First World War. It gives no further account of the assassination or the war’s military course, but makes the scale of the conflict legible through its consequences for Austrian forces: they suffered heavy losses, particularly on the Russian and Italian fronts.

The War as a Historical Boundary

The war stands at the edge of the edition’s discussion of Freud’s early work. The manuscripts of The Interpretation of Dreams and of most texts Freud wrote before the First World War do not survive, making a critical edition that retraced their composition impossible. In 1936 Freud explained that he had put all his manuscripts from before 1905, including that of The Interpretation of Dreams, into the wastebasket. This destruction leaves the printed text and its successive revisions as essential evidence for understanding how his ideas took shape.

Freud’s Response

The book’s chronology records a direct intellectual response to the war: in 1915 Freud wrote “Thoughts for the Times on War and Death.” The entry places that work immediately after the 1914 outbreak, but offers no further account here of its argument. The juxtaposition nevertheless distinguishes the war’s place in Freud’s record from that of a mere date: it was both a violent historical rupture and a subject to which he turned in writing.

The Event and the Text’s History

The war’s significance in this edition is also editorial. The translated text is based on the first edition of The Interpretation of Dreams, published in November 1899 but dated 1900; later editions accumulated additions that increasingly blurred the contours of Freud’s original theory. The eighth edition, published in 1930, incorporated those additions into a single text, while James Strachey’s English version indicated when they had been made, allowing readers to follow the theory’s development. Since the prewar manuscripts were discarded, this distinction between an early printed version and later layers of revision becomes especially important: the surviving publication history, rather than a sequence of drafts, provides the available record of change.