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WorkSigmund Freud

Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis

Twenty-eight wartime lectures to a mixed Vienna audience, starting with slips of the tongue and ending with the neuroses.

by Sigmund Freud839 passages held

  • German, the original language
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Original title
Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse
First published
(aged 61)
Original language
German

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Overview

In the first of these lectures Sigmund Freud advised his audience not to come back. They were doctors and lay people, men and women, in a lecture hall of the Vienna psychiatric clinic late in 1915, while war, as he reminded them, was raging across Europe. Those trained in medicine, he said, were used to being shown things — the specimen, the reaction, the patient — and psychoanalysis could show them nothing; their whole training would make them its opponents, and listening would not teach them to practise it. Over two winters he gave twenty-eight lectures of nearly two hours each, and their order carries the argument. He began with slips of the tongue and forgotten names, which everyone has known, went on to dreams, which everyone has, and reached the neuroses only in the second winter, so that by the time his listeners met a symptom they had already granted its logic in themselves. In the eighteenth lecture he counts three blows that science has dealt to human self-love: Copernicus moved the earth from the centre of the universe, Darwin placed human beings among the animals, and psychoanalysis now claims that the conscious self is not in charge of its own mind. Hugo Heller in Vienna published the lectures in three parts in 1916 and 1917, and Freud's preface calls them a faithful record of what he said, which is why the printed book still addresses its listeners directly and answers their objections as if they had been raised in the room. An authorised English translation appeared in New York in 1920, and the lectures became the most widely translated of Freud's works. Fifteen years after the last of them he wrote seven more, numbered twenty-nine to thirty-five, which were never delivered.

Key concepts

What is the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis?

The patient promises to say everything that comes to mind, even what seems unpleasant, trivial, irrelevant or absurd. Freud calls it the technical fundamental rule, and stresses that the ideas a patient is most tempted to hold back are regularly the ones that lead to what was repressed. Treatment, he says, goes faster or slower depending on how conscientiously the rule is kept.

Why does Freud call the small child polymorphously perverse?

Because a child's sexual pleasure is not yet gathered under one aim. It comes from many separate component drives, attached to the mouth, the skin, looking and showing, each seeking its own satisfaction, and almost any part of the body can play the role of a genital. In adults the same component drives survive, mostly subordinated to the genital aim, and they reappear openly in the perversions.

What is sublimation?

Sublimation is the exchange of a sexual aim for another one that is no longer sexual but social, such as work, art or research, while the drive keeps its energy. Freud notes that society values such aims more highly than the selfish sexual ones. It is one way out of frustration besides falling ill, though he warns that only a part of the libido can be sublimated, and not by everyone.

What separates transference neuroses from narcissistic neuroses?

In the transference neuroses, hysteria and obsessional neurosis, the patient's libido is still attached to people and can attach itself to the doctor, which makes analysis possible. In the narcissistic neuroses, Freud's term for the psychoses, libido has been withdrawn from the world into the self. Such patients form no transference, and the method that works with the first group fails with them.

What are the actual neuroses?

Actual neuroses, such as neurasthenia and anxiety neurosis, are disorders Freud traced to present disturbances of sexual life rather than to forgotten childhood conflicts. Their symptoms have no hidden meaning to interpret; they are direct bodily effects of sexual excitement that finds no proper outlet. He set them beside the psychoneuroses, whose symptoms are meaningful compromises, and noted that one often grows from a core of the other.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Science That Cannot Be Shown

How do you teach a method whose evidence happens only in private, between two people? The lectures answer by turning the audience's doubts into part of the lesson.

Medical students are used to seeing the specimen; psychoanalysis, Freud warns, can show them nothing, and their training will make them its opponents. What it offers instead is a conversation governed by one rule: say everything that comes to mind. That rule runs into resistance, the same force that keeps wishes out of awareness, pictured as a watchman between a crowded hall and a drawing room. And it produces transference, the patient's borrowed love and hate for the doctor, which became the instrument of cure once hypnosis had been abandoned.

  • psychoanalysis
  • methodology
  • resistance
  • transference
  • psychotherapy
  • interpretation
  • unconscious motivation

Enter a dialogue

A Language Everyone Dreams In

Can a dream be read without the dreamer's help? The second winter's lectures on dreams add what the dream book had played down: a stock of fixed symbols shared by all.

Free association usually unlocks a dream, but sometimes the dreamer has nothing to say about an element, and there Freud finds symbols with a constant meaning: houses for the body, departure for dying, water for birth, and a great many images for sex. The same symbols turn up in myths, fairy tales, jokes and everyday speech, as if they were remains of a forgotten common language. Symbol translation, he insists, is only an aid to association, never a substitute, and the dreamer always knows the meaning without knowing that he knows.

  • dream symbolism
  • symbolism
  • dream theory
  • dream interpretation
  • sleep
  • language
  • dreams

Enter a dialogue

Symptoms That Mean Something

Why does a grown person fall ill of something that seems to make no sense? The third part of the lectures carries the logic of slips and dreams into the neuroses.

A symptom, Freud argues, is as meaningful as a slip or a dream: a compromise between a forbidden wish and the forces that repress it, often bringing the patient a hidden gain. Its roots lie in a sexuality that begins in infancy, far wider than adults admit. Libido develops in stages and leaves some of itself behind at each, so that when it is frustrated later it flows back to the place where it stopped. Fantasy keeps a reserve where the old pleasures survive, and from there the way into illness, or into art, begins.

  • neurosis
  • symptoms
  • sexuality
  • libido
  • childhood
  • regression
  • anxiety
  • repression
  • memory

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
839
distinct concepts
607
by passages held, corpus-wide
#77

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “dream interpretation” and “unconscious”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
dream interpretationunconscious38
neurosispsychoanalysis36
psychoanalysisunconscious32
psychoanalysissexuality30
dreamsunconscious22
libidoneurosis20
neurosissexuality20
dream interpretationsexuality19
repressionunconscious16
libidopsychoanalysis15
dream interpretationdreams14
libidorepression13
dreamspsychoanalysis11
psychoanalysisrepression10
repressionsexuality10
libidosexuality8
dreamsneurosis7
dreamsrepression7
neurosisrepression7
dream interpretationpsychoanalysis6
libidounconscious6
sexualityunconscious6
dreamssexuality5
neurosisunconscious4
dreamslibido3
dream interpretationneurosis2
dream interpretationrepression2

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1900 The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)

    Begun from his own dreams in the 1890s and enlarged in edition after edition, this is where Freud sets out the method of interpretation that his later books apply to slips of the tongue, jokes and myths.

     DE
  2. 1901 The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Zur Psychopathologie des Alltagslebens)

    The dream book's method carried into waking life; its slips and forgettings became the opening part of the lectures Freud later gave to beginners in Vienna.

     DE
  3. 1905 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (Der Witz und seine Beziehung zum Unbewußten)

    Freud's only book-length study of comedy, and the one most built from borrowed material: puns, anecdotes and Jewish jokes, each taken apart in turn.

     DE
  4. 1907 Frühe Schriften zu Religion und Dichtung

    Two early excursions from the clinic, gathered here in one volume: the seed of Freud's later books on religion, and his short account of where a writer's stories come from.

     DE
  5. 1910 Zur Theorie des Unbewußten

    Four theoretical papers written between 1910 and 1915 and gathered here in one volume, on the road from the dream book to the metapsychological essays of 1915 — the last of the four is one of those essays.

     DE
  6. 1913 Spätere Schriften zu Dichtung und Mythos

    Two essays from 1913 and 1917, gathered here in one volume, that show Freud the reader of Shakespeare and Goethe: the dream-book method applied to a stage motif and to the first page of a famous autobiography.

     DE
  7. 1913 Totem and Taboo (Totem und Tabu)

    The first of Freud's books on society and religion, where he moves from the patient to the human species; Group Psychology, The Future of an Illusion and his last book, on Moses, all build on its story of the murdered father.

     DE
  8. 1914 On Narcissism: An Introduction (Zur Einführung des Narzißmus)

    A short essay written as Jung was breaking with Freud, and the hinge between his early theory of the drives and the later picture of ego and super-ego.

     DE
  9. 1915 Instincts and their Vicissitudes (Triebe und Triebschicksale)

    The paper that opens Freud's 1915 theoretical series by defining its basic term; the companion essays on repression and on the unconscious build on it.

     DE
  10. 1915 Schriften aus dem Weltkrieg

    Freud's direct responses to the First World War, gathered in one volume on this site: a long essay of 1915 on disillusionment and death, and a short one of 1916 on transience and mourning.

     DE
  11. 1915 The Unconscious (Das Unbewußte)

    Freud's fullest account of what he meant by the unconscious, written in wartime Vienna eight years before The Ego and the Id redrew his map of the mind.

     DE
  12. 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (Vorlesungen zur Einführung in die Psychoanalyse) you are here DE
  13. 1919 The 'Uncanny' (Das Unheimliche)

    A rare venture by Freud into aesthetics, a field he says psychoanalysts seldom feel drawn to, written in 1919 beside the first draft of Beyond the Pleasure Principle.

     DE
  14. 1920 Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips)

    The hinge of Freud's later work: the 1920 book that introduces the death drive, followed within three years by the new map of the mind in The Ego and the Id.

     DE
  15. 1921 Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego (Massenpsychologie und Ich-Analyse)

    The bridge between Freud's speculations on prehistory and his new model of the mind: its chapter on a "grade in the ego" sets out the ego ideal that The Ego and the Id would rename two years later.

     DE
  16. 1923 The Ego and the Id (Das Ich und das Es)

    The book in which Freud's later model of the mind takes its final shape; the essays and books that follow it, on anxiety, religion and civilisation, all speak its language of ego, id and super-ego.

     DE
  17. 1924 Späte Schriften zur Ich-Psychologie

    Three short papers of the mid-1920s, gathered here in one volume, in which Freud tests the model of The Ego and the Id on psychosis, on memory and on laughter.

     DE
  18. 1926 Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (Hemmung, Symptom und Angst)

    Written three years after The Ego and the Id, it rebuilds the theory of neurotic symptoms in that book's terms, starting from the difference between a symptom and an inhibition, a restriction the ego places on itself.

     DE
  19. 1927 The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion)

    Freud's most direct case against religion, written fourteen years after Totem and Taboo had traced it to the murdered father, and the opening of the late cultural writings that continue in Civilization and Its Discontents.

     DE
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