Author | Sigmund Freud |
---|---|
Original title | Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse |
Language | German |
Subject | Psychoanalysis |
Published | 1916–17 |
Media type |
Introduction to Psychoanalysis or Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (German: Einführung in die Psychoanalyse)[1] is a set of lectures given by Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, in 1915–1917 (published 1916–1917, in English 1920).[2] The 28 lectures offer an elementary stock-taking of his views of the unconscious, dreams, and the theory of neuroses at the time of writing, as well as offering some new technical material to the more advanced reader.[3]
The lectures became the most popular and widely translated of his works.[4] However, some of the positions outlined in Introduction to Psychoanalysis would subsequently be altered or revised in Freud's later work; and in 1932 he offered a second set of seven lectures numbered from 29 to 35—New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis—as complement (though these were never read aloud and featured a different, sometimes more polemical style of presentation).
These twenty-eight lectures to laymen are elementary and almost conversational. Freud sets forth with a frankness almost startling the difficulties and limitations of psychoanalysis, and also describes its main methods and results as only a master and originator of a new school of thought can do. These discourses are at the same time simple and almost confidential, and they trace and sum up the results of thirty years of devoted and painstaking research. While they are not at all controversial, we incidentally see in a clearer light the distinctions between the master and some of his distinguished pupils.[13]