A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis

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. A text like this is the most opportune and will naturally more or less supersede all other introductions to the general subject of psychoanalysis. It presents the author in a new light as an effective and successful popularizer and is certain to be welcomed not only by the large and growing number of students of psychoanalysis in this country but by the yet larger number of those who wish to begin its study here and elsewhere.