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[[Freud ]] used "prehistory" to refer to the most remote [[past]], the "already there," the psychically innate, and the [[time ]] before the [[Oedipus ]] [[complex]]. This [[notion]], [[present ]] in his writings as early as 1888, was made more [[explicit ]] in chapter 7 of The [[Interpretation ]] of [[Dreams ]] (1900a). The [[idea ]] runs through his entire [[work]], and after 1912 (1912-1913a; 1913j; 1918b [1914]; 1985 [1915]) was transformed in a [[scientific ]] quest to define [[psychoanalysis ]] as an [[autonomous ]] [[natural ]] [[science ]] of origins. Yet the notion of prehistory was also transformed into a ground for speculating and for pursuing an analogical approach.

From 1912 to 1915, a period of intensive metapsychological theorization, Freud pursued this quest in his investigations and hypotheses with Sándor Ferenczi, himself the exponent of a "metabiology." Freud also definitively broke with Carl Gustav [[Jung ]] and invited first-generation [[psychoanalysts ]] to explore the [[object ]] of [[anthropology ]] and ethnology via the [[clinical ]] method of psychoanalysis (Rank, Róheim). Without ever giving up his [[theoretical ]] grounding in the [[drives ]] and [[libidinal ]] [[development]], Freud introduced the evolutionary views of Charles [[Darwin]], Ernst Haeckel, Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck, Fritz Wittels, and J. J. Atkinson for two primary reasons: to give a new orientation to the problem of how constitutional dispositions relate to [[individual ]] [[history]], and to make two points of view—ontogenesis versus phylogenesis, or development versus evolution—coherent with one [[another]].

This is a bold hypothesis, fraught with theoretical and clinical consequences in that it affirms not only the [[universality ]] of the [[psychic ]] [[apparatus ]] and the archaic heritage of its disposition and [[constitution]], but also the transmission of [[content]], that is, the lived [[experience ]] of previous generations. This is not a [[biological ]] [[theory]], but rather a [[psychoanalytic ]] theory of the history of the facts and [[acts ]] that constitute the biological.

Freud asked the reader to abandon phenomenal [[knowledge ]] in [[order ]] to conceive of the [[primal]], the genesis of primordial [[conflict]], [[anxiety ]] in the [[developmental ]] [[processes]], [[guilt ]] in evolution, [[latency]], and deferred [[action]]. Freud's notions of [[primitive]], primary, primordial, ancient, archaic, and ancestral broaden the notion of prehistory and reveal not only Freud's strong adherence to the evolutionary [[ideas ]] of his time, but also a [[need ]] to conceptualize a prior period that defines the [[subject]]'s history and that the psychoanalytic [[process ]] reactualizes during [[treatment]]. To explore the various borders encompassing the [[concept ]] of prehistory, Freud entered into the domains of anthropology, ethnology, paleontology, [[linguistics]], folklore, history of [[religion]], and archaeology.

The notion of prehistory attempts to legitimize the systems of [[thought ]] of primitive peoples, of [[children]], and of [[adults ]] to be compared, and also reorders the choices of [[neuroses ]] inversely to the hypothetical phases of [[human ]] [[mental ]] development.

# [[Freud, Sigmund]]. (1900a). The [[interpretation of dreams]]. SE, 4: 1-338]]