A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis.

FREUD, Sigmund.

$8,800.00

Item Number: 137144

New York: Horace Liveright, 1920.

First edition in English of the most popular and widely translated of Freud’s works, containing 28 lectures regarding his views on the unconscious, dreams, and neuroses. Octavo, original cloth, frontispiece. Authorized translation with a preface by G. Stanley Hall. Near fine in a very good price-clipped dust jacket. Bookplate and ownership signature to the pastedown. Rare with only a handful of examples appearing at auction in the last 90 years.

In his three-part Introductory Lectures, by beginning with a discussion of Freudian slips in the first part, moving on to dreams in the second, and only tackling the neuroses in the third, Freud succeeded in presenting his ideas as firmly grounded in the common-sense world of everyday experience. Making full use of the lecture-form, Freud was able to engage in a lively polemic with his audience, constantly engaging the reader/listener in a discussion, so as to take on their views and deal with their possible objections. "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" (G. Stanley Hall, Preface).