Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis: A Course of Twenty-Eight Lectures Delivered at the University of Vienna.

FREUD, Sigmund.

Item Number: 104186

London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1922.

First British edition and first edition in the English language of this fundamental work on psychoanalysis. Octavo, original cloth with gilt titles and ruling to the spine, engraved frontispiece and printer’s device to the title page. Translated by Joan Riviere with a preface by Ernest Jones. Very good in the otherwise non-extant original dust jacket. Contemporary inscription to the front free endpaper. The only traceable example of this important work in the original dust jacket.

Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis contains 28 lectures given by Freud between 1915 and 1917, each offering 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. The lectures became the most popular and widely translated of his works. However, some of the positions outlined in Introduction to Psychoanalysis would subsequently be altered or revised in Freud's later work. G. Stanley Hall in his preface to the 1920 American translation wrote: "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."