Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Twenty-eight lectures that Freud delivered at the University of Vienna in the winter terms of 1915–16 and 1916–17 to an audience of physicians and lay listeners, published in three parts by Hugo Heller in 1916–17. They became his most widely read general account of psychoanalysis. The first part treats parapraxes, such as slips and errors, as acts that carry meaning. The second sets out the theory of dreams: the dream censorship, symbolism, the dream-work and wish-fulfilment. The third offers a general theory of the neuroses, moving from the sense of symptoms, resistance and repression through the sexual life of human beings, the development of the libido and its organisations, regression and fixation, and the paths by which symptoms form, to anxiety, narcissism and the libido theory, and finally transference and analytic therapy.