Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse [...] - INSCRIBED PRESENTATION COPY

Leipzig--Wien--Zurich: Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag. 1922. Taschenausgabe. Small 8vo. 494 pp. Inscribed by the author on fly leaf for Arthur Schütz (pseud. Erich Ritter von Winkler) (1880-1960), Austrian engineer and writer. Soft binding in full calf, gilt-stamped, prepared by the publisher for the author to give to important friends, this copy inscribed in advance of the official publication and dated 18 Decemeber, 1921. Spine with modest wear, overall a fine example from the pioneering and highly influential founder of psychoanalysis whose theories revolutionized the understanding of the human psyche.


The "Introduction to Psychoanalysis" is a set of lectures given by Sigmund Freud 1915-17 (published 1916-17), which became the most popular and widely translated of his works. The 28 lectures offered 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. In his three-part Introductory Lectures, he begins with a discussion of Freudian slips in the first part, moving on to dreams in the second, and tackles neuroses in the third. In his preface to the 1920 American translation, G. Stanley Hall writes: "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." Freud himself, typically self-deprecating about the finished work, described it privately as a "coarse work, intended for the multitude". [Peter Gay, Freud (1989) p. 369] (12440)

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