An Outline of Psycho-Analysis

Freud's last, unfinished summary of psychoanalysis, written in 1938 in Vienna and then in London, and published after his death in the Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse und Imago in 1940. In nine chapters arranged in three parts, it restates his theory in a compressed and dogmatic form. The first part sets out the psychical apparatus of id, ego and super-ego, the theory of the drives as Eros and the destructive drive, the development of the sexual function, the qualities of the psychical, and the interpretation of dreams. The second part turns to the technique of psychoanalysis and gives an example of its work. The third part, on the psychical apparatus and the external world and on the internal world, breaks off unfinished; it takes up the splitting of the ego in the process of defence and disavowal.