Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Freud built these twenty-eight lectures, delivered at the University of Vienna between 1915 and 1917, as a single graded argument. He opens with parapraxes: the slips, misreadings and forgettings a listener dismisses as accident, and uses them to establish that mental events carry causes outside awareness. He then turns to dreams, reading manifest content back to a latent wish through condensation, displacement and the censorship. Only then does he reach the neuroses, where symptom formation appears as the same mechanism under pressure.

For a clinician the value is Freud's first topography stated whole and in sequence, before the later structural revision. He argues each step against an imagined sceptic, so the reasoning behind libido, regression, fixation and compromise is set out rather than assumed. The on-file Penguin edition carries James Strachey's translation from the Standard Edition, edited by Strachey and Angela Richards.